The Nightmare Stacks

by Charles Stross

  “So what am I walking into?” Alex asks abruptly.

  “There is a ley line at the bottom of this mineshaft, and this is a defensive spell set to protect it from intruders. Which means it must lead to my people. Hold my hand . . .” Cassie raises one foot, then delicately steps across the edge of the ghostly glowing design on the floor. Alex looks down and realizes: She’s still holding my arm. “Come on.” She tugs him after her. “It is configured to kill anyone not of the Host or accompanied thereby who tries to enter,” she explains, “but I am one such and you are with me.”

  “Well, fuck.” He tries to stop as Cassie begins to descend the stairs but his feet aren’t listening; and his phone begins to buzz in his pocket, the thaum sensor vibrating a warning. “You’ve got me caught in a geas of your own,” he says mildly.

  “Yes.” Her tone is almost apologetic. “I was sent hither to gather intelligence and find the magi of the enemy and bring him to my father. That is my geas. I invited you three times and you accepted, YesYes? But I’m not totally constrained—” She stares at him over her shoulder, an expression of desperation on her face as she continues in another language. “I set you free.”

  Alex lurches to a halt as she steps off the staircase into the tunnel leading into the bunker. His expression is most peculiar. “I didn’t know you spoke Old Enochian,” he says. Then he swallows, and walks after her.

  “Speak? Of course I can speak, what—what are you doing, idiot? You should flee!” She stops dead and stares at him, her expression shocked. “This isn’t going to end well! One or both of us is bound to die, and then—and then—”

  “You’re not getting rid of me that easily.” She’s vibrating like a live wire as he takes her hand, and he can see the muscles in her neck standing out. He strokes the back of her hand very gently as he speaks, trying to convey the calm certitude she clearly needs. “I thought it was obvious what I’m doing: I’m coming with you to see your father. But first, we need to talk about what we’re going to do when we find him . . .”

  * * *

  When Alex hit the button to send his text message on its merry way, he expected it to produce a shit-storm of epic proportions—but he had little or no idea of the sheer scale of the events it was about to set in motion.

  BUNKER GEO NODE COMPROMISED CODE RED CASE NIGHTMARE RED

  It is 2314 hours BST on a Saturday night in London when the Duty Officer’s phone terminal displays the message. The Duty Officer tonight is, as usual, sitting alone in the Duty Office in one of the decontaminated wings on the second floor of the New Annex. First he checks the origin of the message and verifies the caller ID by hand from the official (printed, top secret) departmental phone book. This takes him approximately thirty seconds. Having authenticated the sender, he then looks up a second number. Then he picks up the telephone handset and calls it.

  At 2315, the phone rings in a conference room on the fourth floor, where the DM is morosely pondering probabilities, Vikram Choudhury is catching up on a couple of briefing documents he needs to be familiar with in time for a meeting on Monday morning, and Johnny McTavish is snoring quietly, an early copy of the Mail on Sunday shielding his face from the flickering overhead lighting tubes. Vikram twitches violently, sending papers flying, and makes a grab for the handset. “Room 414,” he says, “yes?” He listens intently for a moment, frown lines forming on his forehead. “I’ll tell them,” he replies, finally. “Notify everyone on the Red List. We’ll be ready when you call back.” He puts the phone down, and looks across the table to where Derek is watching him. Vikram clears his throat nervously. “We have a Code Red in Lawnswood,” he states. “Report from Alex Schwartz. He’s announced CASE NIGHTMARE RED.”

  Johnny sits up. “Dear me,” he says mildly. He pulls out his phone and speed-dials a number. Seconds later: “Duchess? We’ve got a Code Red in Leeds, and an EAT case report tagged RED to deal with . . .”

  A wave of electronic signals ripples out from the Duty Office and the Watch Team in the fourth-floor conference room, lighting up darkened offices across the nation and pulling key personnel back from their weekend retreats.

  In Cheltenham, in an office deep inside an anonymous block not too far from the donut-shaped hub of GCHQ, two analysts suddenly find themselves inundated with transcription requests. They feed SIM codes and IMEIs to their secure terminals, provide override authorizations for the interconnects with the phone companies’ networks, and begin to replay the past day’s conversations to a farm of servers capable of turning spoken words into readable textual transcripts, accompanied by maps and a handy timeline to indicate who said what, where, when, and to whom.

  In an aircraft hangar at Filton, not far from the Bristol Channel, a phone that should never ring begins to buzz in the ready room office, causing a man who wears a blue uniform to break into a cold sweat as he picks up the handset. He frowns intently as he notes the call in a logbook, pen clenched between white fingertips, not once looking at the sleek white shape that fills the hangar floor beyond his office window. If he did, he’d see a sudden burst of movement as the engineers on the night shift begin the ground prep checklists for a mission that should never fly.

  Phones begin ringing in the Duty Offices of peripheral Laundry field installations everywhere from Penzance to Inverness, anywhere big enough to rate a 24x7 desk presence. The Duty Officers retrieve their contact lists from their office safes and begin to call people, working down the hierarchy. (Mobile phones are also displaying text messages, and priority email queues are overflowing—but the gold standard is a confirmation by voice, “message received” on a secure landline number.) One office, in Huddersfield, makes no such calls: instead, the Duty Officer walks out into the ready room next door, raises a protective flap, and pushes the alarm button concealed behind it. (Boots come running.)

  Early on Sunday morning, the anthill finishes kicking its on-call elements into a state of high alert, and the ripples begin to spread out beyond the organization.

  The first external signal goes to a call center in India, which is operated on behalf of a private security company based in Bradford. This call is started well ahead of midnight by a member of the New Annex Watch Team, but a number of obstacles delay its completion. For one thing, the call center is in the middle of an evening shift change, and the staff are reluctant to stay on line despite a client call. The call has to be repeated three times. For another, Telereal Trinium seem content to employ a subcontractor whose staff have poor language and communication skills and a lackadaisical approach to emergencies. (This issue will not go unnoticed by the Parliamentary Public Enquiry in the months to come.) In any case, it takes until 0014 before a private security guard from the Leeds office sets out to visit the Lawnswood bunker, and they do not arrive until 0028. Inexplicably it takes another twelve minutes for them to gain access, and the eventual call to the West Yorkshire Police emergency control room is logged at 0043, over an hour and a half after the incident.

  It’s a Saturday night but the pubs have already closed, and the weekly cleaning-up action on the streets of Leeds is winding down. The first responder—as luck would have it, an Armed Response Unit—arrives on the scene at 0049, and the site is flagged as a homicide case within ten minutes.

  While West Yorkshire’s finest are puzzling over the discovery of two armored bodies outside a supposedly secure government installation with a glowing green radiation hazard visible through the bashed-in door, phones are ringing elsewhere. In Fareham, a call is received at NATS Swanwick near the south coast, the national-level Air Traffic Control Center for England and Wales. Near Hereford, the Duty Officer in the Pontrilas Army Training Area takes a call and forwards it to a captain running a night training exercise. And elsewhere, calls are being made to various military and sensitive civilian installations that need to know that, in the vaguest possible terms, something big is about to kick off.

  One fateful phone call goes unans
wered.

  The DM stares balefully at the phone as it rings continuously, then diverts to voice mail. “Pick it up,” he grates, “pick the damn thing up.” Then he ends the call and hits redial.

  Derek the DM has been war-dialing Alex’s mobile phone continuously for close to an hour, hanging up and redialing endlessly. They’ve requested a trace from GCHQ, but it hasn’t arrived yet; there’s no way of knowing why it isn’t connecting. The Watch Team meeting room is now crowded with the great, the good, and the concerned—Dr. Armstrong was the first of the Auditors to arrive but they’re almost all here now, along with those local elements of Mahogany Row who aren’t already charging up the M1 motorway in a convoy of police cars with flashing lights. Dr. O’Brien, the newest Auditor, is still on medical leave, but her former unit—the Transhuman Policy Coordination Force, the police agency for superpowers—is represented by Mhari Murphy, ill-temperedly displaying her fangs over being called in on a weekend night. Bob Howard, lately standing in for the Eater of Souls, is somewhere in Japan, and Colonel Lockhart is listening in on the conference line from Leeds, making notes in case he has to brief the Cabinet Office in the morning.

  “Pick up the bloody phone, Alex,” hisses Mhari as the DM dials his mobile number again.

  But Alex is not going to pick up the phone that he set to vibrate, not ring, before he headed out for his fateful date. The phone is rattling and squealing like an overtaxed vibrator, its thaum flux warning app overloaded so badly that the regular buzz of an incoming call is swamped. Which is why he remains blissfully unaware that in the two hours after he sent his text message, it has triggered on the close order of half a million pounds in billable overtime hours, hundreds—soon to be thousands—of sleepless nights and abandoned weekends, and a full-dress Police murder investigation.

  But that’s nothing compared to what’s going to happen in the next few hours.

  14.

  THE NIGHTMARE STACKS

  The lights are on in drab-looking government offices in Leeds as well as London, and a crisis meeting is in progress in an office in Quarry House.

  “He’s out late.” It’s Brains. He sounds both sleepy and irritable, as well he might. “He borrowed Ilsa to pick up his date and do dinner. That’s all I know.”

  “Not good enough.” Gerald Lockhart frowns, mustache bristling. “Why is he late? He sent that message, then went dark, and now he isn’t answering his phone.” Gerald Lockhart, External Assets Manager, charged with executing the DM’s plan for the missing PHANG in Leeds, is distinctly unamused. “Pinky. What word on his phone?”

  “The trace isn’t showing up.” Pinky twirls a finger across the trackpad of a laptop. He’s frowning, too, more in perplexity than disapproval. “It went to his parents’ street in Bramhope, then back towards town, but it stopped pinging when he hit the bunker. At least I’m pretty sure he went to the bunker—his last location is solid to within about a hundred meters—”

  “So we know where he went, but not where he is. Not good enough.” Lockhart’s mood is not improving. “What does his activity log show?”

  “Well. He ran OFCUT, but it’s offline now so it doesn’t tell me much. The thaum field it was logging was sky-high, but going by that report on the bunker it might just have gotten contaminated. It’s not paired with a high-precision field-effect counter so I can’t be sure.”

  “So.” Lockhart taps his pen on the table, cap first. It makes an ominous tonk as it hits the hardwood. “Let me summarize. This morning, Weather Control flagged anomalous ley line activity to the east of the Pennines. The DM is on the list, and just under three hours ago he called Dr. Schwartz and asked him to check out the Lawnswood bunker. An hour later our man sent up the red flag. It’s geotagged from the bunker, and he reports CASE NIGHTMARE RED—how does he know this? It’s a mystery. He then goes off-grid. The police check on the bunker and find two bodies, deceased—”

  Pete, who has been reading something on a tablet screen, looks up and diffidently waves his hand for attention. “They’re not human.”

  “What.” Lockhart turns his death-stare on Pete, who seems unfazed.

  “OCCULUS have been on-site for half an hour now. Sergeant Noakes just sent a preliminary sitrep. Look.” He lays his tablet on the table and tap-zooms on a photograph. “What does that say to you?”

  Heads crane over the small screen. “What.” Lockhart’s tone sharpens. “That’s an ear? Dammit.”

  Pinky is peering at the same report on his laptop screen. “There’s a cartoon convention in town but that’s no cosplayer, not unless cosplayers have plastic surgery and wear several thousand pounds’ worth of bespoke steel armor. And get into fights with . . . um.”

  “Look,” says Brains, sounding irritated, “they’ve got Ilsa.”

  Lockhart looks at him, then at Pinky and Pete. “So what are you waiting for?”

  Pete stares at him. “What?”

  “Go and get your half-track before some jobsworth tries to wheel-clamp it,” Lockhart snaps. “OCCULUS are busy with the incident scene and the police are as much help as a portion of warm ice cream so I’m relying on you troublemakers to locate Dr. Schwartz and extract him from whatever mess he’s gotten himself into. You might just need an all-terrain transporter with a solid steel body shell, if Forecasting Ops are right about this one. Go on, get moving.” He waits while they leave, then turns to Jez Wilson. “Do you want to call Dr. Armstrong, or shall I?”

  “I’ll take it if you handle the army and OCCULUS,” she says automatically. “What’s the message?”

  “He needs a full summary so he can report to the Cabinet Office emergency meeting tomorrow—this—morning. Assuming it’s not a false alarm.” Lockhart sighs noisily. “He’s going to have to explain to the deputy prime minister that one of our vampires is missing. And then the shit is really going to hit the fan. But first I think I need to talk to site security.”

  He picks up the handset and dials an extension. “Site security? Colonel Lockhart here. Authenticate me, please . . . good. I am declaring a Code Red for Quarry House and the Arndale Satellite Office in Leeds. I repeat, Code Red, Code Red. Please tell Control that I recommend transferring control over MAGINOT BLUE STARS coverage on the Leeds Inner Loop Road and all approaches to Quarry Hill to site security here, in anticipation of a hard incursion. Then you will call the office of the Commander Land Forces at Army GHQ in Andover and tell them that PLAN RED RABBIT is in effect.”

  Jez Wilson stares at him, aghast. “You want to activate SCORPION STARE in a city center? Are you out of your mind?”

  “I hope not,” he says grimly, “I really hope not. I also fervently hope that Forecasting Ops have got egg on their face. But it’s best to be ready for the worst. Then you won’t be disappointed when it happens.”

  * * *

  Cassie leads Alex down the stairs into the bunker, marveling at and simultaneously mourning his misplaced loyalty. She feels a stab of lust and tenderness that surprises her with its intensity. He’s following her of his own volition, despite knowing what lies ahead. She may have freed him from her will to obey, but love is also a kind of geas, and one that she can’t control. (Part of her wonders whether she would have been consciously able to free him from her third-date snare of compulsion if she hadn’t been aware of his obsession; probably not, she decides. All-Highest’s goals override both whim and reason.)

  Agent First understands Alex a good deal better now. She’s seen the house that shaped him, and has the perspective from Cassiopeia to recognize the claustrophobia and alienation that drive him. The beginnings of a plan are coming together in her head. It’s a plan that would be hopelessly naive and foolish if Alex was of the People, with their candidly nihilistic outlook on life—but he isn’t. He’s urük, and these round-eared folk are gentler and more trusting than her own kindred. So is she. Among these people, the fatal flaw in her soul that she has concealed for so long
is unremarkable. But there are limits to trust, and this plan won’t work unless—

  She licks her suddenly dry lips. “Alex, do you trust me?”

  “That’s a leading question, isn’t it.”

  “Yes.” Ahead of her a tunnel slants down into the earth. The overhead strip lights are out, but the glowing runic tracery of the ward upstairs sheds just enough light for her crepuscular vision.

  “Well.” He pauses. “If I didn’t trust you I wouldn’t be following you, would I?” A momentary catch in his voice. “I have an idea, but—what do you think we should do?”

  She walks forward slowly. “My father bears your people no particular ill-will; they are simply in his way and he’ll try to crush them. Our world is no longer inhabitable. My father thought to lead the Host somewhere they can live safely. Stepmother suggested this world. She fed him old reports which were at best wrong and at worst disastrously misleading. He thinks to conquer and compel obedience, as is usual among our kind. I believe her plan was to let him, but to encourage him to bleed himself in the process, weakening him to pave the way for her ascendancy.” She closes her eyes, seeing in her mind’s theater the television set downstairs in her student lodgings, the evening news, the unimagined vastness of this crowded city-hive of humanity overhead, the realization that this isn’t even a large human city, that it’s a provincial capital in a medium-sized nation, the creeping apprehension of scale— “But he’s wrong. Your people are far stronger than they expect. He will kill a lot of people, all of his own and many of yours, if he is not made to stop. And she’s even worse.” She is choosing her words very carefully here, walking along a razor-edged precipice between suicidal treason and rationalized defense of the All-Highest’s interests. “I do not want that to happen, Alex, but I cannot stop him because I am bound to obey the will of the All-Highest.”