The Nightmare Stacks

by Charles Stross

  The last thing he expects is an after-midnight phone call, so when his network phone begins to buzz it takes him a moment to focus. “GHQ duty desk, Major Cameron speaking. Who is this?” He stares at the caller ID display. The call is coming from somewhere in the MOD, but it’s not an office he recognizes. “Hello?”

  A woman’s voice speaks. “GHQ? This is Q-Division, Special Operations Executive, Headquarters North. We have a major incident developing, reference PLAN RED RABBIT, that’s PLAN RED RABBIT.”

  “You’re who?” Cameron stares at the phone, perplexed. The only Special Operations Executive he’s heard of was a Second World War sabotage organization, disbanded in 1945 after a postwar turf war with MI5. He has no idea what PLAN RED RABBIT could be, but it’s probably buried in his big fat ring binder of coded alerts. Unless it’s a prank call, of course. He wouldn’t put it past a couple of the sprogs in the mess to set him up the bomb, but— “Please hold,” he says, dumps the procurement bumf on the beige-tiled carpet, pulls the desk binder over, and flips pages one-handed. It doesn’t take long. “Please confirm that plan again?”

  “PLAN RED RABBIT. Focus is Headquarters North, Quarry House in Leeds. We have a major incident developing, confirmed hard contact with enemy special forces in North Leeds, and we need you to activate RED RABBIT now—”

  Major Cameron’s eyes widen as he quickly reads the page. “Let me confirm and get back to you,” he says, and hangs up hastily, before the terrifying litany on the other end of the line deteriorates into a series of ancient curses chanted in an alien tongue. He hastily scribbles the phone number on his blotter, then says the first thing that comes into his head, which is: “What the fucking fuck?”

  It may be four in the morning, but the phone call has reached the parts that coffee cannot wake. He kicks his chair back, yanks a key ring from the key box next to his desk, and rushes into the main office next door without pausing to fill out the logbook. Which is technically a breach of regulations, but if this isn’t a fucking juvenile prank by a Rupert from Sandhurst it’s quite possibly an emergency, and if it is a prank the idiot whose idea of a joke this is will be cleaning toilets with a toothbrush for the next decade. Or worse.

  Four minutes of rummaging through the pages of another ring binder from the RESTRICTED documents cupboard in the next office convinces Major Cameron that if it is a joke, the prankster is a boss-level overachiever. PLAN RED RABBIT is indeed a thing. It’s the current post-2010 strategic defense review update to something that first showed up in the files in 1945 as PLAN BLUE BUNNY, then got updated in the early 1950s to PLAN GREEN GOBLIN and in the 1970s to PURPLE PEOPLE EATER, suggesting a slight shortage of serious intent on the part of the operations planners or their management. But RED RABBIT nevertheless exists, and furthermore, the printed first page of the plan indicates that an alert coming from SOE Q-Division is one of the start conditions. Except that RED RABBIT is a response plan for a Never Happens scenario.

  The Army has contingency plans for everything.* They used to have plans for invading the USA—a counterstrike after the anticipated US annexation of Canada—at least until the mid-1930s. They still have plans for organizing stay-behind resistance after a Soviet invasion, even though the USSR hasn’t existed for a quarter of a century. These are half-jokingly classified as Never Happens (Probably). But RED RABBIT is a Never Happens (Definitely) case. Its mere existence is probably nothing more than the only remaining evidence of an awful homework assignment handed out to a bunch of Sandhurst cadets as informal punishment for getting too fresh with a visiting lecturer. RED RABBIT is indexed in the classified lexicon on the same page as RED HARE and RED HORSEMAN. RED HARE is the plan for what to do if and when Martian death tripods land on Horsell Common; RED HORSEMAN is the official Army plan for dealing with the Apocalypse of St. John the Divine.** But RED RABBIT is a little different . . .

  Cameron reads the next page, swearing softly in disbelief, then hastily goes back to the key safe to pick out a key to a somewhat smaller steel cabinet containing files that were once marked as SECRET, before the coalition government upended the entire security/confidentiality classification system and replaced it with a multidimensional thing of horror that nobody quite understands. There is a directory of code names that squaddies aren’t supposed to know because what they don’t know can’t scare them. He looks up SOE, then Q-Division, and starts swearing even more loudly. There is a phone number in the directory, and he makes a note of it, then locks the file back in the cupboard before he returns to his desk, and dials the number.

  “Ops desk,” says a male voice at the other end of the line. Cameron stops swearing audibly: the number he dialed connects via the Ministry of Defense’s own internal voice-over-IP network. If it’s being spoofed, even for a wind-up mess hall hoax, someone’s head will roll.

  “Q-Division, this is Army GHQ. I have a caller claiming to be one of yours from, ah, Headquarters North, who is declaring PLAN RED RABBIT is in effect. Can you confirm?”

  “Yes, please hold while I transfer you. Headquarters North situation room coming up.”

  His phone blares hold music for a few seconds—a snatched ear worm refrain that digs its claws into his head in seconds, D:Ream’s “Things Can Only Get Better”—then the same woman’s voice speaks: “Hello? Is that GHQ?”

  “Yes,” Major Cameron says through gritted teeth, then forces himself to loosen up. His palms are damp. “Can I confirm that you definitely want to activate PLAN RED RABBIT?”

  “Yes.” The woman’s tone is incisive. “We have two dead non-human intruders, missing personnel, and an incursion in North Leeds. An OCCULUS team from 23 SAS is on-site and can confirm through their own reporting chain. This is not an exercise.”

  “Understood.” Cameron takes a deep breath. “Okay, we’re under strength right now so I need to go off-line and work the phone tree. Call me back in half an hour if you haven’t heard anything. Sooner if you have any further developing contacts.” He crosses the fingers of his free hand under the table.

  “Wilco. I’ll tell London to prep a pre-cleared liaison bod to brief you in person. HQ North out.” She hangs up without waiting, and Cameron flips to the next page in the ring binder, then opens the Emergency Plan telephone directory and dials the number at the top of the page.

  The phone rings three times before it’s picked up. To Major Cameron it feels like an eternity because this can’t possibly be a prank, but it can’t be the real thing either, and if it’s a prank the prankster has gone well beyond latrines-and-toothbrush territory at this point and is now looking at a court martial, and Cameron is looking at early retirement if he’s lucky—

  “Yes?” The voice is rough from sleep, but clearly awake. “Who is this?”

  “Sir,” Cameron forces himself to stay calm, “this is Major Cameron at GHQ. I have an authenticated emergency report and am putting the major incident plan into effect. You are my first contact. SOE Q-Division just reported a contact situation in Leeds and have declared PLAN RED RABBIT.”

  “RED—fuck me. RED RABBIT? Seriously?”

  Cameron keeps a straight face: he figures under the circumstances the general is allowed to swear. “Yes, sir, at least they’re taking it seriously. 23 SAS is apparently involved.”

  “Understood. I’m on my way in. Carry on, tell everyone to get their arse in gear and there’ll be a briefing at 0500 hours.”

  The general hangs up and Cameron briefly pauses to wipe his forehead, then dials the next number on his list. He feels slightly less tense: if Major General Holmes has heard of RED RABBIT and this Q-Division mob and is taking them seriously, then he’s made the right call. “Sir, this is Major Cameron at GHQ. I have a confirmed major incident in progress and the major incident plan is in effect. You’re needed at HQ for a 5 a.m. briefing . . .”

  After the top five seats get a personal wake-up call, Cameron hits his computer terminal and sends out a priorit
y message to the crackberries of everyone who qualifies for a pager these days (not for secure data, but just to ensure they’re on a leash): MAJOR INCIDENT BRIEFING AT 5 A.M. Then he goes back to ruining the colonel’s beauty sleep. He has one job for now, and that’s to ensure that when Major General Holmes gets to the briefing room it will be full of equally unhappy officers (and a sprinkling of civil servants) and that someone will be there to fill them in on what the hell is going on.

  Martian invasion: sure, the Army understands what it needs to do, if not necessarily how to go about it. Religious apocalypses involving the Four Horsemen: pass the holy water and bend over, here it comes again. But invasion by the armies of Middle Earth—who ordered that?

  * * *

  Alex leads Cassie down into the Lawnswood bunker.

  He pauses a couple of steps down the sloping corridor, briefly adjusting his phone. The OFCUT suite can run a defensive ward, although it’s hell on battery life and has an annoying tendency to screw with GPS location. Also he feels the need to collect himself. Cassie isn’t keeping her distance anymore, but wraps her arms around his waist and leans her chin on his shoulder. “What are you doing?” she asks quietly.

  “Necessary preparation, assuming we’re going to do this thing we’re not talking about. Hush a moment . . .” He slides his phone away again. “Okay, let’s go. Uh, there was a caretaker living here. What do you suppose happened to him?”

  “Don’t ask.” She lets go of him as he takes a step forward. “They might have taken him prisoner.”

  He recognizes a comforting lie when he hears one. “He might have taken the night off, too.” He hates himself a little for wanting to believe it, so distracts himself by walking forward.

  The blast door looms around the curve of the tunnel, gaping into the corridor. (In event of a nuclear attack, huge hydraulic rams stand ready to pull it closed, flush with the wall, to allow the shock wave to blow past the bunker’s entrance.) A ghostly greenish radiance spills from beyond the threshold: there are more luminous grids painted here, and Alex is careful to hold Cassie’s hand as he advances. He can feel the energy in the ley line rushing through, far below his feet. Of course the entry node would have to be in the basement, wouldn’t it? “Will there be other guards here?” he asks.

  “Not soldiers. They might have set mage-beasts to guard the anchor instead.”

  Alex swallows. “And mage-beasts are . . . ?”

  “You don’t have . . . ? Oh. Of course you don’t. Creatures compelled to obedience by a trainer-mage, like guard dogs. Or like”—she frowns—“living sentry guns? From that movie with the woman and the cat who fights the dragon queen at the end?”

  “You mean Aliens?”

  “YesYes!” Cassie is happy with her shiny pop-cultural reference but Alex’s heart sinks. His idea of a second date was dinner with family, not a live-action dungeon crawl. Meanwhile he’s wearing a sports jacket and chinos and the other side are playing for keeps. “Cassie.” He takes a deep breath, trying to control his fright, because if he is certain of one thing it is that he is deadlier than he realizes, and if he knows anything about this baffling, infuriatingly attractive intrusion in his life it is that she is equally capable of looking after herself—Jesus, she killed an armed guard without breaking a sweat. “We’re on the top floor of three and we’re going to have to take the stairs. Are you armed?”

  “Of course!” She offers him the handle of a steel knife the length of her forearm. He recognizes it from the assortment of stabby accoutrements the soldiers upstairs had strapped to various parts of their armor: judging by the basketwork hand-guard it’s a main gauche, a parrying dagger.

  “Right. I should have known. Stupid question. Did you bring anything else?”

  “Will this do?” she asks, raising the baton that’s part of her costume, left-handed. She barely waves it: he can feel ripples of static raise the hair on his arms as it parts the air.

  “I’d better take the knife, I don’t know how to use that.” She hands him the dagger wordlessly. Alex takes it, feeling as light as a feather and sick with a fear he can control as long as he doesn’t think about it too hard. Bottom level. Big corridor. Sentry guns. “Let’s do this.” He tenses and opens up his consciousness, feeling a sense he can’t quite articulate as he visualizes a blazing five-dimensional fiery knotwork revolving inside his head, fractal gears revolving within skeletal Möbius loops—

  His superspeed kicks in and everything around him seems to slow down. The light reddens and dims, and the air thickens to the consistency of water as he sprints towards the other end of the corridor.

  He spins round, presenting his back to the wooden door for impact, sees Cassie’s mouth slowly open, her eyes widen as she meets his gaze. Everything is very cold and as he draws strength from his V-parasites he hears a mindless chittering sound, as of a million mandibles nibbling at the paper-thin walls of reality. His back hits the door and the wood splinters and shatters, exploding away from him as he finishes his turn: but all he feels is the gnawing maddening hunger in his soul, the hunger of a black hole that seeks to destroy everything he touches. His feet fly out from under him and he skids across the cement floor and out over the first flight of steps, bounces off the opposite wall of the shaft, then begins to fall.

  Cassie is running after, but although she’s fast she doesn’t have his PHANG mojo—or magi power, as she’d put it. She flies down the steps moonwalk-slow, taking them three at a time with her mace held before her. Its tip is glowing violet. He hits the middle floor landing, absorbs the impact with his toes, and gently kicks off, aiming himself at the next flight of steps. His shoes leaving a black rubber slug-trail on the concrete, gently smoking.

  Then he sees the writhing luminescence of eaters on the loose beyond the exit from the shaft, and realizes he might have bitten into something too big to bleed.

  * * *

  A wave of blue-eyed equine horror floods across the Yorkshire Dales, but the only human eyes that witness the progress of the Host of Air and Darkness are dead.

  The armored column rides six abreast, their ranks stretching back for kilometers behind the spearhead. A cloud of dust and debris roils in the air above them and the earth drums beneath their clawed feet. But the riders who make up the column are curiously hard to see. The unaided and unprotected human eyeball naturally slides past the riders, interpolating less disturbing images: an out of place freight train thundering along a track where no rail runs, perhaps.

  To the fore, and spaced to either side of the column at regular intervals, ride the magi in their closed carriages. The sun is still below the horizon, and the magi have windows of subtle crystal through which they maintain watch. They watch the land unroll to either side, and whenever they see an observer they sink ghostly fangs of necromantic venom into the witness’s visual cortex. As the column pounds across a B road, a milk tanker returning from an early farm run rounds a curve. The driver blinks, bleary-eyed, and begins to brake: by the time his vehicle has rolled to a halt he slumps dead at the wheel, eye sockets bleeding and empty around the withered stumps of his optic nerves.

  There aren’t many casualties at first. A few farm workers, up and about in the early hours. Trucks on their way to make deliveries, cars driven by those unlucky enough to have Sunday morning jobs. They screech and skid, spinning and shedding bumpers and metal when they rebound from the drystone walls lining the roads, drivers already dead. But as the column pounds onwards across the countryside, the death toll begins to mount. They die by handfuls at first, then by tens and scores and windrows.

  The Host’s route bypasses the urban sprawl of the urük for the most part, which is a small mercy. They pound across open country until, south of Rylstone, they pick up the Grassington Road. The two metaled lanes provide fine footing for the Host, although it is here that they receive their first injuries: two of the front rank of cavalry troopers are unable to dodge the sk
idding Hovis Bakery truck that jackknifes side-on across their path as its driver convulses and dies. Their mounts roar angrily, struggling on rapidly healing broken legs, but the riders are less lucky: no amount of armor will save one of the People from a hundred-kilometer-per-hour collision with a Volvo engine block.

  As the road bends towards Skipton and the ugly stone hovels grow more frequent, the Host leaves the metaled surface and races across the nearby golf course, bypassing the center of the small market town. At half past six, a couple of kilometers east of Skipton, the armored column encounters the A65. And now the slaughter begins in earnest.

  The A65 started life as an eighteenth-century turnpike, but today it is a fast, two-lane-wide main road, running northwest from Leeds to the Yorkshire Dales. In the near-dawn on a Sunday morning it is not heavily trafficked, but nobody has explained the urük traffic laws to the Host’s marshals. Consequently, the first encounter with a Range Rover barreling along at a cheerfully excessive hundred and twenty kilometers per hour comes as a nasty surprise to the front rank. Angry remonstrations are exchanged; nearing the crest of a hill the column bunches and pauses, and then regroups to continue its march behind a screen of fire magi, their incendiary gaze at full alert.