The Nightmare Stacks

by Charles Stross

  “Visual flicker goes away when I use instruments,” Quebec-1 announces.

  “PIRATE isn’t locking in sector acquisition mode,” says Quebec-2. The passive infrared tracker is the Typhoon’s other main target acquisition sensor—a giant heat-sensitive eyeball mounted just ahead of the windscreen. Normally it can accept targeting information from the CAPTOR-E radar, but for some reason it can’t pick up whatever the fighter’s radar set is seeing. A metal airframe reflecting sunlight, or the heat of an engine exhaust, ought to show up like beacons. But Contacts One and Two are too dim to distinguish from ground clutter. Things have just gone from bad to worse.

  For a couple of minutes the two pilots try to reset their faulty sensors. But it rapidly becomes clear that the multimillion-pound infrared search and tracking systems on both aircraft are sulking identically. Radar can track the targets, but eyeballs—neither electronic nor human—can’t look on. “It’s a tightly focussed visual distortion,” Quebec-1 tells Scampton. “Similar to what migraines are supposed to be like. Can’t see the target with or without helmet cueing, just a moving knot in the landscape that hurts to look at. Closing to visual range may not help.”

  “Roger that,” replies combat control. “Update on situation, we lost a civilian wide-body over the Pennines, adjacent to the ground track of Contacts One and Two. You are cleared for nose hot, engage at will if no-comply.”

  “Nose hot,” confirms Quebec-1. “Select Fox-1.”

  At this point, the two dragons are thirty kilometers north of the oncoming fighters and their AIM-132 short-range homing missiles. The Typhoons’ Attack and Identification radar alone is enough to cue the missiles’ on-board homing avionics. The missiles have their own infrared imagers, and as the AIS readies them for launch the thermal sensors chill down, ready to look at their targets. With weapons ready, Quebec-1 and Quebec-2 open their throttles wide and accelerate, closing to confirm before they launch that Contacts One and Two aren’t an innocent air ambulance or a police helicopter that’s forgotten its transponder.

  This does not go unnoticed by the dragonriders.

  “Sky-daggers turning in and incoming, seven o’clock high. Target one, shoot shoot shoot.”

  Firewyrms are living, albeit thaumically enhanced, organisms from a biosphere drastically different from the one we are used to. Their huge bat-like wings are supported by hollow, very light bones and support membranes as strong and light as spider silk. So as the sky-daggers stoop towards them on pillars of fire, the riders direct their steeds to do what comes naturally: to tuck in their wings and turn hard.

  Jet fighters, for all that we think of them as maneuverable, are cumbersome in comparison to flying animals. A fourth-generation jet like an F-16 or a Typhoon can pull up to nine gees in a turn; the missiles they launch can briefly sprint at thirty to fifty gees before they burn out. But a peregrine falcon in a stoop—a mere bird—can pull around twenty gees. Dragons are bigger and slower than birds but have additional adaptations to help them survive in a sky full of terrifying predatory horrors: and they can keep fighting while their riders recover from g-induced loss of consciousness.

  To the pilots of Quebec-1 and Quebec-2, the eye-watering knots in the sky that they are diving on (now at six hundred knots, holding back from supersonic cruise for the time being) suddenly change shape, narrowing and stretching. The CAPTOR-E radar switches mode frantically, trying to track them. Their ground speed drops abruptly to zero as they switch cleanly onto a reciprocal course and begin to rise, slamming on the brakes with impossible agility. To Quebec-1 it looks just like a cobra maneuver—a tactic pioneered by Soviet Su-27 pilots to break Doppler radar lock—and for a terrifying split-second he suspects the worst: that they’ve been suckered by hostile fighter aircraft—

  “Fox-1 go,” calls Quebec-2.

  “Fox-1 go.” Four flame-tipped streaks of smoke boil away from the fighters and drop down, slashing towards the intruders.

  ASRAAM is a short-range air-to-air guided missile. It uses an inertial guidance system primed by the launch fighter’s Attack and Identification System to aim towards the volume of air towards which the target is flying at the moment of launch. As it closes, the thermal optical imager in its head picks up the target and feeds course corrections to the guidance vanes that direct the airflow around the rocket’s body. These missiles are not the stupid heat-seekers of the 1950s and 1960s, guided by a dumb heat sensor: otherwise fighters targeted by the missile could eject a bunch of flares and turn, pointing their hot engine exhaust away from the missile, confusing it. Instead, the twenty-first-century missiles carry an infrared video camera that feeds an onboard computer loaded with target recognition software.

  A dragon—especially a dragon that is pulling in its wings to change direction, then actively flapping—looks absolutely nothing like any helicopter, fighter aircraft, airliner, zeppelin, or missile that has ever taken to the skies above England. Not only is it the wrong shape but it’s cold, it doesn’t reflect sunlight like metal, and the homing missile’s guidance package can’t make any kind of sense out of it. Also, the imaging elements are glitching like crazy, so that the picture the missiles are trying to interpret is little more than a field of random static.

  Four missiles hurtle towards a volume of sky occupied only by a pair of rapidly diverging knots of noise. They slice on through the air trailing sonic booms behind them as they fail to lock onto their targets, until they self-destruct ten seconds after launch. A series of concussive thumps rattles windows across the northern suburbs of Leeds.

  “Guns guns guns, target one,” Quebec-1 announces calmly, and points his nose ahead of where the eye-watering hole in the sky ought to be as he sets up a deflection shot. His helmet is in sighting mode but keeps glitching and twitching as one or other of the optical sensors gives up on the target and freaks out. Above and behind him, Quebec-2 is drawing down on target two. They’re still over open countryside, which is good (nobody wants to spray armor-piercing cannon shells across a city), but it means getting up close and personal with the target, which is writhing and turning as it hangs in the air like a demented bat—

  “Fire! Fire!” orders First Wing, shivering with frustration as the onrushing dagger stubbornly refuses to twist aside and spiral into the ground. It’s almost as if the damned urük sky-cart doesn’t have a brain. For a couple of seconds First Wing was certain he was dead, that the flame-stabbing darts were going to turn towards him and slice the wings from his mount’s body. But they slammed past his mount as if they hadn’t even seen it. And now the dagger itself is wobbling in the air and turning towards him and his mage is silent, frozen in fear or concentration. “Fire!”

  Finally one of the heavy bolts slung alongside his mount’s body springs away from its clip and buzzes towards the enemy daggercraft on a surge of malevolent mana. “Got it, my Lord,” his mage gasps, her voice like living death. “It’s not alive. It’s like an empty suit of flying armor—”

  First Wing screens it out, filing the information for later. He has other, more urgent problems. The onrushing daggercraft is spouting fire from its muzzle like a weird mechanical dragon, and he jinks hard and spreads his wings and claws, scrabbling at the air to throw himself aside from the spraying arc of white-hot pellets that hurtle towards him. He turns and climbs and, at the last possible moment before the daggercraft slashes past, he burps his mount.

  The esoteric bioalchemy of firewyrms does not, regardless of garbled myths and tall tales, grant them the ability to breathe fire. Compared to the digestive hellbrew they carry in their five-lobed stomachs and use to incinerate their prey, fire would be an anticlimax. Few organisms can make any use out of elemental fluorine, but the dragons’ ancestors were taken by the People from a place where biology followed a road less taken. They evolved—or, quite possibly, were designed by insane alchemists—to chew down on fluorinated minerals. Their leathery scales are permeated with polyfluorinated long
chain waxes; as for their stomachs, it’s anybody’s guess how they contain their contents without liquifying their own organs. But if a firewyrm sprays digestive juices at you, you’ll pay attention for as long as it takes your face to melt.

  Quebec-1 takes his shot, discharges a twenty-round burst from his aircraft’s Mauser BK-27, and races past the target, preparing to come about in a high-energy turn. As he does so the slow but impossibly maneuverable target pirouettes in mid-air and sprays a smoke-ring of misty liquid into his path. It shouldn’t be possible for a liquid to propagate that far and that fast without dispersing, but evidently some exotic effect of turbulent fluid dynamics is at play. Either way, Quebec-1’s engine intake ingests a good-sized gulp of the cloud.

  Modern gas turbines are incredibly finely machined engines, made from exotic ultra-hard alloys and spinning at unbelievable speeds. They can take a lot of abuse, up to and including a frontal impact from a medium-sized bird. But they are definitely not designed to survive ingesting almost a liter of wyrmspit—a substance subsequently determined by defense establishment scientists to consist mostly of aerosolized chlorine trifluoride.

  Chlorine trifluoride is about the most powerful oxidizing agent known to chemistry that is still stable at liquid-water temperatures. Stable is a euphemism: it ignites spontaneously on contact with sand, concrete, asbestos, water, paint, and fighter pilots. Both Quebec-1’s engines suffer multiple uncontained blade failures and spray white-hot molten shrapnel through wings, fuel tanks, and the rocket motor of the unlaunched AMRAAM missile on Quebec-1’s number 4 hardpoint. Which explodes, and in so doing detonates the missile’s warhead, ripping what’s left of the fighter into several pieces.

  Quebec-2 is almost a second behind Quebec-1. Air-to-air gunnery is to some extent a statistical process: you throw a double-handful of fist-sized explosive shells at a volume of sky a couple of kilometers away and hope one of your devil’s shotgun pellets intersects with your target. Quebec-2 takes his shot on the second target and instinctively pulls away in a high-gee turn just as Quebec-1 disintegrates.

  Quebec-2 gets lucky. Fourth Wing is already turning his wyrm as a spreading burst of cannon shells expands towards him. His mage focusses furiously on his dazzlers and blinders, pouring mana into the circuits that should bamboozle and stun the vicious little attackers’ minds, misdirecting them as they did the much bigger war-dart the daggercraft threw at him half a minute ago. But there’s nothing there, no minds to confuse—it’s almost as if the enemy is throwing insensate arrowheads at them across a gulf of leagues! Fourth Wing desperately tries to turn out of the path of the shells. But he’s too late.

  One of the thumb-fat rounds—a steel-sheathed shell surrounding a frangible tungsten core and a bursting charge—punches a hole in the crystal screen protecting Fourth Wing’s mage, narrowly missing its occupant but shattering the canopy and exposing him to the early daylight before it tears into the body of the firewyrm and explodes. Exposed abruptly to daylight and a hundred-knot wind-blast, the magus and her V-parasites ignite like a roman candle. Fourth Wing swears and doubles up in his saddle as a pulse of agony cramps at his chest and left shoulder. It’s referred pain from the brain leech, which vicariously relays his mount’s senses for a fraction of a second before the leech, too, can take no more: it yanks its feeding proboscis from the base of the dragon’s skull. The mortally wounded dragon coils in the air, draws in on itself around its lacerated stomach, and falls out of the sky. The last thing its rider sees is a spurt of greenish flame erupting from his magus’s howdah, before a blast of sudden heat blots out his senses.

  Backlit by sunrise, a parachute drifts towards the ground, its occupant dangling unconscious beneath it. The ejector seat detaches and drops towards the burning wreckage littering the fields below, its job done. In the distance, the surviving dragon and Typhoon turn and circle each other warily.

  * * *

  “All right, Lieutenant Cook, time to move out.”

  “Yes, sir.” Lieutenant Jim Cook takes a deep breath, and looks at his platoon sergeant: “You heard the captain?”

  “Sir.” Sergeant Magnusson nods sharply, then gets on the troop voice circuit. “Okay, everyone, start your engines and sound off . . .”

  It’s six o’clock in the morning at Catterick Garrison in North Yorkshire, and a Sabre troop from C Squadron of the Royal Dragoon Guards—an armored cavalry regiment—is preparing to move out. There’s organized chaos on the ground as the soldiers prep their twelve Scimitar light tanks and grab every available Panther, truck, and Land Rover they can lay their hands on. They’ve scoured the barracks for every TomTom and Garmin satnav with up-to-date maps they can find. They weren’t expecting action this day and the crews are mixed up, soldiers assigned to driving duty on the basis of their blood alcohol level rather than their regular post. Commanders, gunners, and drivers can swap seats as necessary once they’re nearer the target. Cook is up front, riding ahead of the support troop in one of the Panthers, the better to be able to jump out and deal with delays while they’re in convoy on the A1. The Highways Agency and the police should be holding the southbound carriageway of the road for them, but if one of the combat reconnaissance vehicles breaks down or sheds a track they’re going to need an officer on hand and Captain Roberts is going to be too busy talking to everyone from the police to the Apache drivers from 3 Regiment (when they get here from the south coast) to have time for shouting at knuckleheads.

  The call came in less than two hours ago: something insane is brewing up in Leeds and the Guards are needed on MACV—Military Aid to Civil Power—duty. Not for civil defense or assistance in the wake of a major incident, which would be comparatively welcome, but to deal with the kind of shit that they’ve just spent several years dealing with in Helmand. The stated mission is frankly bonkers, but Sergeant Magnusson has been too busy finding plausibly sober bodies to throw at vehicles and checking everyone’s got the right set of frequencies dialed in and the right set of maps on board and Cook has been too busy quickly cramming on the terrain and the rules of engagement to worry about what the battalion staff have been smoking.

  “Elves, Lieutenant.” Major Moran shook his head, world-weary as if he was announcing another Taliban suicide attack in downtown Kabul. “Pointy-eared bastards with an allergy to cold iron. Get your laughing over and done with right now: I am reliably informed that this is not a joke, and not a case of contagious insanity either, unless the first lunatic in the asylum is the chair of the general staff. It’s going to be all over the news by nine, and you can expect everyone to be distracted by families phoning in unless you get a tight grip. Tell them to set a voice mail message and send their texts before we move out, then it’s deployment rules.” Virtually no spot on the planet is without cellphone coverage these days: troops and their families can talk whenever they want. Which is fine, right up until Tommy Atkins’s eight-year-old phones Daddy by mistake while Daddy is pinned down under fire next to a teammate who’s bleeding out, or the local phone company engineers’ families are taken hostage by hostiles who know precisely which calls they want diverting. Then it stops being fine and turns deeply, unpleasantly weird.

  “Sir?” It’s Cook’s driver. “Ready when you are.”

  “Okay, drive on. Keep it slow until I tell you.” Cook turns round in his chair, to watch as the queue of CVR(T)s fire up their engines from cold, blasting out clouds of blue diesel smoke.

  The Scimitars are fast armored scout vehicles—light tanks suitable for battlefield reconnaissance in a war of maneuver. Just what you want when the enemy are riding around in Toyota pickups. They’re able to engage infantry and other light units but it’s not their job to go head-to-head with dug-in forces or artillery, let alone a real enemy with main battle tanks. Luckily that’s been a thing of the past since the Iraq war, but nobody knows what’s happening in Leeds right now except that maybe it involves cavalry, some sort of Lord of the Rings crap, and there’s no s
ign of artillery. This is promising at first, but on the other hand, horses suggest mobile light troops who could pop up anywhere with who-knows-what: IEDs, guided antitank missiles, magic wands. Jim isn’t sure what’s going on, but from the way the armorers have been running around handing out live ammo by the crate—armor-piercing cannon shells included—he is willing to bet that it’s so bad it’s going to make the history books. The kind of civilian casualties that could result from a gunnery exchange in dense British suburbia don’t bear thinking about. So he’s particularly edgy as his driver boots the Panther command car south down the A6136, towards the motorway junction.

  They make it onto the A1 in good order. The road is wide open and utterly empty, although the row of red and blue flashing lights astern tells its own tale. The northbound carriageway is logjammed with slow trucks as the police and Highways Agency try to clear a lane for contraflow running. Driving down the empty motorway at a hundred and ten kilometers per hour with a police escort is a surreal experience, but Jim is kept busy with radio traffic and intermittent data updates. At least the Scimitars are all keeping up, although a couple of the Land Rovers fall out: they get driven every day and stuff breaks more often when you throw squaddies at it on a regular basis. (The tanks and armored cars get fettled and stored under cover between exercises: nobody borrows them to go to the supermarket.)