The Nightmare Stacks

by Charles Stross

  The meal is over all too soon (or perhaps not soon enough). Luckily Alex’s counting cantrip saves him from the sucking attention vortex of the channa dhal, so he is present in mind as well as body to hug his mother goodbye when it’s time to go. “You look after yourself,” she warns him. “And see if you could get your girlfriend to do something about her hair? It’s very striking, but . . .”

  “Yes, Mum.” Alex manages not to roll his eyes, and feels very grown-up. “I’ve got to get her home now.” Via a party.

  He finds Cassie in the hall, deep in some sort of furtive exchange with Mack. “Hey?” Mack says, seeing him; Cassie startles, looking faintly guilty.

  “Hi.” His helmet sits on top of the coat rack like the skull of a vanquished enemy war-band leader: he grabs it and pauses. “Are we ready?” he asks. “Do you need more time?”

  It’s Subdued Cassie who answers: “I’m ready to go.” Unexpectedly she swoops in on Mack and kisses her on the cheek. “You be careful! Remember what I said!”

  “No fear.” Mack looks at her, then at Alex, her expression wary. “We were just leaving anyway.”

  “Leaving?” Alex looks between them, just as Sarah comes downstairs, carrying a duffel bag. “What’s going on?” He blinks. “I don’t think there’s room on board to give you a lift—”

  “We’re going back to Nottingham,” Sarah says briskly.

  “What, right now?”

  “Yes. We can just make the last train if we call a minicab.” She gives Cassie a hard stare. “I hope you know what you’re talking about.”

  “So do I.” Cassie is uncharacteristically low-key, and this in and of itself puts Alex’s back up. “Alex, can we go? Right now? Please?” She’s almost bouncing up and down with tension, but there’s nothing happy-go-lucky about it: it’s as if she’s just learned there’s a terrorist bomb threat in the vicinity.

  “I guess so.” Alex nods at his sister. “Uh. Talk later?”

  “See you around.” She manages a faint, slightly shaky smile. “Go on. I’ll sort out the leftovers and talk Mum and Dad down from the trees while we’re waiting for our car. You don’t need me around.”

  “I don’t—” There is subtext here, but Alex can’t for the life of him work out what it is.

  “Go on. Scram.”

  He opens the front door. Kid sisters. He feels Cassie following close on his heels. “Don’t stop,” she urges him. “We should not stay here! We should not leave our scent behind!”

  “Our scent.” He stops dead.

  Cassie hisses impatiently. “Wait one moment.” She pulls out a fat black marker and goes to work defacing his parents’ front door.

  “Hey!” he manages, just as he recognizes the design. The runic script she annotates it with is unfamiliar but the star-within-a-pentagon of a Petersen Graph is frighteningly familiar, as is the trailing Elder Sign.

  “This will hide your parents for a while, I hope,” Cassie says quietly. “They are good people, they do not deserve to be caught up in what’s coming.” She makes the marker vanish, then pulls out a pin from somewhere in her cloak and stabs the ball of her thumb.

  Alex’s mouth fills with saliva. Her blood smells silvery, different—he forces himself to step back as she fills in the nodes of the graph with the reddest ink of all. “Take me home,” she says again.

  “Hide them from what?”

  “The wild hunt. Take me home, please?”

  Alex stands very still. “If I do that, you’re going to answer all my questions,” he says.

  Cassie thinks for a moment, then nods.

  * * *

  Alex almost drives as far as the Otley Road before he remembers he promised the DM he’d check out the ley line linking the Lawnswood bunker to the center of town. The bunker is indeed just off his route home. Ilsa is chugging and rattling along happily, and Alex makes a snap judgment call. Having a heart-to-heart with Cassie is important, but he doesn’t want to have to drive out here tomorrow just because the DM’s got his knickers in a twist about a weather forecast from the department of oracular obfuscation. So as he nears the driveway concealed by the row of poplars he pulls off the road, parks, and clambers over the side of the half-track.

  “What is it?” Cassie hops down behind him.

  “Work asked me to check on something,” he tells her vaguely. “I’ll only be a minute or two. Damn. I don’t have the keys . . .” He looks at the chain holding the gates shut, and sees a new and very shiny padlock securing them.

  Cassie cocks her head to one side, bright-eyed and thoughtful as a magpie: “You need to get inside, YesYes?”

  “Yes, but—”

  She walks up to the gate and grabs the padlock with one hand. “Ouch! It’s cold.” She brings up her other hand and twists the lock round to a better angle.

  “You don’t need to—”

  There’s a quiet click and the hasp releases. “Does that help?” She holds it up proudly.

  Oh crap. Alex stares for an anxious moment. “Let me drive Ilsa inside. Can you shut the gates behind me?” It wouldn’t do to leave the half-track parked on the Otley Road, and he has an inkling this may take longer than expected. Indeed, he has a feeling that he really shouldn’t be bringing Cassie in on this. If he had any sense he’d be on the phone screaming for backup, and holding her until he can get her into a warded debriefing room. Just because she isn’t a many-tentacled thing of horror it does not follow that she is safe to be around. But an odd sense of fatalism grips him, as if everything is already determined. Whatever’s happening here has already happened. Something is wrong, and he’s not sure what it is, but he can’t get away from it by walking out now. It’ll follow him, snuffling along his trail in search of the bloody spoor of his magic—

  He zones out for a while. When he comes back to his own head he swears under his breath. He’s in Ilsa’s saddle, parking up at the end of the drive in front of the decaying shed that squats above the nuclear bunker. Cassie crouches at the top of the steps, motionless, her cloak blending in with the shadows. She’s deep in a dangerous stillness: he almost misses her, his eyes gliding right past, even though he knows what the front porch looked like on his last visit. A light blazes through one of the windows. It’s probably only candle-bright but to his PHANG-sharp night vision it shines like a beacon. He kills the ignition, and in the sudden stillness he feels his fingertips prickling. He can rarely feel the proximity of a ley line directly—he needs a K-22 or similar unit to be sure it’s there—but this one’s really strong. Much stronger than it was last time he visited.

  Alex climbs off the Kettenkrad, steps clear of the mass of cast iron and steel, then checks his phone. His pocket OFCUT dongle isn’t very accurate but it says the thaum flux is almost off the scale, as if a flash flood has turned the trickle of muddy water at the bottom of an irrigation ditch into a turbid torrent. He swipes a quick text message on his phone, attaches the OFCUT readings, and fires it at the Duty Officer’s number. “Cassie,” he says quietly, guessing that those pointy ears must be good for something, “we ought to leave—”

  She waves him to silence, her hand gestures urgent and expressive. Her ear twitches as she leans close to the door, motionless. Then: “Get down. There are guards.”

  Alex drops and rolls towards Ilsa’s tracks. The ground is dry, and he is fastidiously grateful. He doesn’t have time to take his helmet off, but with the visor up he can see well enough and his face is in shadow.

  He hears them first, footsteps on earth accompanied by an odd jangling clanking sound. A squeal as of bare metal surfaces rubbing reminds him of a display at an Army recruiting day when he was a kid, minus the hammering of the power pack in the Challenger tank. Whatever they are, they aren’t stealthy, and they’re close—

  A pair of armored knights step around the edge of the building.

  Alex stares. No, they’re not knights. At l
east, they’re not wearing classical European armor. He saw enough suits of very posh Renaissance plate in the Royal Armouries the previous week that these guys look wrong. But not wrong in a theatrical, this-is-for-show-not-work way: just unfamiliar. There is gothic fluting on the pauldrons and cuirass and other parts he can’t put a name to, but the articulation is different and the helmets have wide, high earpieces, and in particular there is a visor with some sort of crystal or toughened glass so that he can see their eyes, alert, scanning the shadows. They have swords slung from their belts, but they hold short truncheons that are naggingly familiar, until he recalls Cassie’s mace. When he looks at them they make his eyes hurt, like staring at a powered-up summoning grid for too long.

  Fuck me, it’s the medieval cybermen, he thinks, then tenses because they’re bound to spot Ilsa in a second and then they’ll see him—

  But they don’t spot Ilsa. Ilsa is blanketed by Brains’s heavy-duty no-see-em ward, and Alex lies in her shadow. Instead they walk right past her, around the front of the building, armor clattering softly with each step (soldiers in full steel plate can move surprisingly quietly), and then one of them notices Cassie.

  There is no shouting and no wasted motion, but both soldiers act as if controlled by a single mind. Their truncheons come up simultaneously, one of them bearing on Cassie while the other spins round, moving unbelievably fast for a man who’s wearing at least twenty-five kilos of steel. He hasn’t seen Alex but he’s raising his weapon in anticipation of another intruder: they’re well-trained, alert, and all hell is about to cut loose.

  Alex reacts without thinking. He shoves himself off the ground with a surge of power that comes unnaturally easily, drawing deep on his V-symbiote’s energy. He kicks off towards the nearest man. Time slows down as the ground recedes below him. The mace begins to glow blue-white as he stretches his arms out towards the prey and opens his mouth, teeth expanding painfully in his gums—

  Something punches him in the sternum, hard. There’s a bang as his beefed-up defensive ward explodes, fragments slicing into his chest as he jumps. A wash of pure rage ripples through him, shockingly unfamiliar in its arrogance: rage at the spam-in-a-can who has the sheer effrontery to aim an occult weapon at him. He’s still trying to make fists of his slow-moving fingers when he hits the soldier with a brain-rattling crash, knocking him off his feet and sending them both sprawling in the dirt with Alex on top.

  Something is happening on the front steps but Alex doesn’t have attention to spare because his own target is fast, strong, and demonstrating a keen interest in murdering him. If Alex was a normal, pencil-necked nerd of mathematics geekery, he wouldn’t even have gotten off the ground before the soldier gave him a lethal zap with the thaum capacitor in his truncheon. But Alex is a PHANG, and although he’s not remotely well-trained in hand-to-hand mayhem, he’s a lot stronger than he has any right to be. He’s also inhumanly fast when his V-parasites take over. This is not the first time people—soldiers, even—have tried to kill him. The first time it happened he froze; the second time he rules-lawyered his way out of it; and this time it just makes him angry.

  Alex’s first punch doesn’t achieve much except to make a truly impressive noise and send a silvery shock of pain through his knuckles. But his second punch is so strong his victim’s breastplate buckles. And, for a miracle, tank-guy stops trying to get his gauntlet-clad hands around Alex’s throat and instead moves his forearms across his gorget and pushes. Alex can see a face, contorted behind a half-misted visor. He’s shouting something Alex doesn’t understand as he squirms, trying to get away: Ah, bless, how cute, he thinks muzzily. His left fist is a solid lump of throbbing agony and Alex is hungry, hungrier than he’s ever been except back in the warehouse right after he’d been zapped with the backlash from a ceiling rigged with ultraviolet flashbulbs—and the prey recoiling centimeters away from his aching jaws smells of fresh warm wet food—

  —Metal yields and bends beneath the tip of his right index finger, and the smell intensifies dizzyingly—

  “’Ware his knife!” Cassie calls, and everything around Alex flashes into sharp focus. The prey he’s sitting on: one arm is broken, but the other is raised above Alex’s back with a dagger (Alex has no idea how he knows this, he certainly can’t see it). Cassie: squats on a prone armored body, blood squirting in rhythmic splashes—

  —The prey’s knife-arm sags weirdly, shoulder bending the wrong way as Alex’s right hand digs into the steel gorget protecting the prey’s throat and twists, hard. Rivets pop and his fangs pulse in his gums with ghastly urgency. He bends and shoves his mouth towards the gap in the armor. The prey tenses, and one steel-capped knee rams him in the balls with enough force to reduce a normal human male to breathless agony. But Alex is a spectator in his own body, watching as the things he invited into his head reduce the man beneath him to meat, convulsing as it dies with terrifying rapidity. V-parasites normally kill over days or weeks, not seconds. He stretches out his left arm, feels the shattered bones in his hand slide greasily into position as the swelling subsides. The numbness between his legs also fades. He realizes that he’s not hungry anymore, and the body beneath him isn’t moving. There was none of the rush that normally accompanies feeding. He takes a deep breath, aghast at what he’s just done, and looks up.

  Cassie is sitting on the bottom step, using her cloak to wipe down the blade of a dagger that’s barely wider than a bodkin. Her eyes track him, unblinking.

  “I thought you said you were immune to—”

  “I am,” she says shortly, sliding the knife into her sheath as she stands. “So are all those of noble rank. We have a, a vaccine? Something like that. Else we could not survive the appetites of our own magi. But not these, not common soldiers. It is their obligation to provide sustenance for the magi, should there be no better source to hand.” She looks round. “Why did you attack my father’s men?”

  Alex looks at the body behind her, then back at her. “Is that who they are? I thought I was protecting you!”

  She looks away. “You probably were. I do not think I was supposed to come here or, having come, to leave alive. But why are you here?” She takes a wary step towards him. “Why, Alex?”

  “I was sent—” A momentary look of confusion crosses his face, then clears abruptly. “I don’t think I’m allowed to tell you. If you are connected to these”—he gestures at the fallen guards—“I should be asking you some hard questions. Like, why are they here?”

  “Patrolling, guarding . . .” Cassie frowns, looking at him: but Alex is silent. A wall has gone up between them. “If you hadn’t killed your man I would have ordered him to tell me everything.” She doesn’t mention her own victim. “I don’t know what they’re doing here. I’m not privy to my father’s plans.”

  “Then,” his gaze flickers to her knife and the mace she holds ready in her right hand, then back to the door, “why don’t we go inside and find out?”

  * * *

  In London, the DM is becoming concerned. So concerned that he’s camping out in the office, working over the weekend. So concerned that he’s called up a Watch Team and signed for their overtime to keep them in the building, 24x7. So concerned that he’s on the edge of sending up the bat-signal to call in the Deeply Scary Sorcerers of Mahogany Row—

  —Because something big and very messy indeed seems to be kicking off in Leeds, and while he’s set up the parameters of the scenario it’s anybody’s guess as to how well Alex will perform as bait in a honey trap. After all, if you farm bees on rhododendron flowers you get poisoned honey . . .

  The Laundry runs on codewords and committees, and sometimes they overlap confusingly. It’s less obsessive about secrecy than most other government agencies; the oath of office all staff swear binds them with a geas to act always to further the interests of the Crown authority vested in them, so the presumption is that staff are trustworthy. Consequently secrecy is mostly used to avoid
burdening specialists with too much confusing detail outside their area of expertise, rather than as a defense against enemy infiltration. But there are exceptions. Even now, years after the fact, the COBWEB MAZE group are still trying to work out how Iris Carpenter subverted her oath of office so thoroughly that she squared running a congregation of the Cult of the Red Skull with her remit as a departmental manager in IT Services. Theories to account for her deviant behavior include an undiagnosed psychopathic personality disorder, an impressive talent for double-think, and overexposure to Windows 2000 Domain Services. Whatever the reason, it is now clear that relying exclusively on geas-enforced loyalty is inadequate. Especially since some of the newest high-value human resources (PHANGs, not to put too fine a point on it) respond idiosyncratically—if at all—to all forms of blood binding, including geases.

  The original cause of the DM’s concern was a report Forecasting Ops emitted more than six months ago, during the early stages of preparations for the migration to the new Headquarters North building in Leeds. Forecasting Ops are notoriously vague, sketchy, not to say Delphic in their utterances. But Derek is not in the habit of ignoring strong hints from oracles, and FO’s warnings about the consequences of not reinforcing the peripheral security cordon around Headquarters North as soon as possible were far less vague than normal, verging upon the apocalyptic. But when someone on the MORTAR BRICKS working group suggested that perhaps the move to Leeds might be a bad idea, or should at least be postponed pending a full review, Forecasting Ops threw such a collective hissy fit that word reached the Audit Committee and Mahogany Row. A diktat came down the line, backing Forecasting Ops up to the hilt: something bony was obviously rattling around inside the locked wardrobe of the unrealized future, but the best way to stop it escaping appeared to be to expedite the move and beef up security. However, the changes to the relocation program are proving extremely costly—and if something doesn’t show up on time to justify the ghastly expense, Accounting is going to ensure that heads roll. It is, everyone agrees, altogether too damn similar to the whole Y2K mess.*