The Nightmare Stacks

by Charles Stross

  Hammering down the motorway is thirsty business, so after less than an hour Jim gets on the radio. “Prepare to pull over, we’re breaking at Junction 46, third exit, that’s Junction 46, third exit, follow the signs for fuel.” As expected there’s a police car with lights waiting to escort them into the service area, where the bemused petrol station attendants come outside to gawp as if they’ve never seen a convoy of tanks queuing for diesel before.

  There’s controlled chaos at the pumps. Trooper McGarrett manages to scrape the Bowman aerial off the roof of Scimitar Three on the roof of the filling station, then backs up over the curb and crunches a bollard. Sergeant Stevens is running around making sure that the cars that run on unleaded don’t get in the DERV queue and vice versa, while Jim dismounts with his radio op to stay well away from any fuel fumes. He’s getting itchy twenty minutes later as the last of the Scimitars pull forward to the diesel pumps—at least they’ve all got Esso cards to pay with—when the major finally arrives, in the back of a traffic patrol Volvo. “What’s the damage?” he asks Lieutenant Cook, tight-lipped.

  “A bit over two thousand liters of DERV, five hundred of regular unleaded, and they’re probably going to bill us for the pump McGarrett damaged . . .”

  “Get your men back on the road as soon as they’ve locked their filler caps.” Moran walks, stiff-legged, towards the petrol station office. Cook shakes his head and heads over to the Panther CLV. The armored car—an Italian/British equivalent to the MRAP—is kitted out with all the comms equipment he could ask for and a GPMG on the roof. It’s also a much better bet for driving into a British city than a Scimitar, with its relatively restricted visibility. Even so, he feels a bit exposed without even a light tank’s worth of armor.

  Ten minutes later they’re back on the road again, burning rubber south towards the junction with the A58 at Wetherby when the open channel lights up: “Incoming enemy aircraft!” From a reporting location less than twenty kilometers to the west.

  “The fuck,” Lieutenant Cook swears, and grabs at his own headset: “Eyes up, we have airborne incoming!” And he’s just looking up to scan to the east, still waiting for confirmation, when the dragon soars over the treeline and sees the convoy.

  PART 4

  BLOOD OATHS

  17.

  STATE OF SIEGE

  Eaters: information patterns from another universe that are real good at taking over and subverting high-level adaptive neural networks with bodies, then using them to acquire touch-contact with other bodies containing neural networks. The information content of which can be quite handily nutritious to an eater because, well, that’s what they live on. An eater without a body is relatively harmless as long as your brain is warded, or the eater is surrounded by a secure containment grid, or otherwise occupied by another eater. An eater with a body is a self-propelled viral infection with contagion by touch, zero incubation time, and a 100 percent lethal effect on the personality of anyone unfortunate enough to be tagged. With a couple of exceptions: being tagged by an eater is harmless if you’re host to a different kind of high-level informational predator—the Eater of Souls, say, or the V-symbionts that cause PHANG syndrome, or whatever bizarre construct the elite of the empire inoculate their minds with.

  Their touch still stings like a wasp, though, and an eater can do real damage if it’s trying to tag you using the teeth of a great big German shepherd guard dog with luminous green-glowing worms in its eyes and an even worse attitude than usual.

  Alex squeaks as the dog lunges out of the darkness and bites his left arm. The dagger in his right hand dangles uselessly as he flinches away. But the dog doesn’t follow through. A real German shepherd would shove Alex off-balance, twisting and chewing and rending, tearing blood vessels and trying to get him on the ground where it will lunge for the throat. But instead of a canine mind the brain behind the dog’s eyes is host to an eater, and the eater is frozen in something like shock, because it has just bitten into a juicy fruit and found itself gnawing on a lump of peach-painted wood. One touch of those teeth and Alex should be on his knees, identity bleeding into darkness. But instead Alex staggers, his arm burning, and the possessed dog does not push or snarl or bite, but staggers with him, and he unfreezes and nerves himself to swing the dagger, point-first, towards the doggy throat.

  Alex stares into the undead dog’s eyes for a moment that feels like a lifetime. The luminous green worms in the German shepherd’s eye sockets spiral and twirl kaleidoscopically, speeding up as it tries to shove its will into his body. He has a momentary inkling of their meaning, a vast and chilly astonishment at his refusal to keel over and dissolve in the sea of the eater’s appetite; then he shoves the dagger into its sternum. The sudden transfer of weight from his left to his right arm unbalances him as a gout of blood sprays across his hand and he begins to fall.

  “Alex!” shouts Cassie, and the room lights up pinkish-white as she channels the force of her anger through her mace.

  The next things Alex becomes aware of—in no particular order—are his ears ringing, his arm and ankles throbbing viciously, that his vision is occluded by huge purple blotches, his face seems to be on fire, and he has a splitting headache.

  “Are you all right?” asks the bulky purple blob hovering anxiously overhead.

  “Blooboob . . .” Alex spits. Dog blood, especially the blood of a dog that’s had its mind chewed up and crapped out by an eater, tastes utterly disgusting, even before you add in the peculiar taboo against animal cruelty that haunts the British middle classes as they sit down to eat their Chicken Kiev—dogs are man’s best friend, after all, and it is just not done to stab them to death and roll around in their blood, even when they’ve been possessed by undead alien foulness. “Not. Good. Help me. Up?”

  Cassie grabs an arm and tries to lift him. Alex manages to catch his balance and staggers to his feet, blinking. His face is peeling and the smell of roast meat fills his nostrils. “What. Happened?”

  “They didn’t bring enough guard beasts so they harvested the nearby park for spares,” Cassie reasons.

  They find the occult diagram that anchors the ley line endpoint in the room at the end of the corridor that once housed the air filtration and conditioning plant for the bunker. Light the deep blue of Cerenkov radiation pours from the thaumic containment circle. “Whoa.” Alex pauses. “Is that the—”

  “YesYes . . .” Underlit by the grid, Cassie’s frown turns her eye sockets into shadowy recesses as she crouches down to trace the script around the outer circle. It flickers and glitters, violet in the darkness. “Looks like they moved the dream road anchor through here. It’s still entangled with the ley line.” She rises, baring her teeth in a death’s head grin. “This is the right route. Come on.” She offers him her hand.

  “Are you sure this is safe?” Alex asks ironically. He takes her fingers, feeling the sticky dampness of blood glue them together like a promise of violence.

  “Of course not: my stepmother is trying to kill me. But I’ve met your”—she shudders delicately—“parents. Is it not proper that you should meet mine?”

  “This is so not second date territory.” Then he steps across the edge of the ward and the world unwraps itself around them, dropping them onto the ley line.

  * * *

  The National Air Traffic System is having a very bad morning.

  Ripples begin to spread outwards within seconds of the first fireball over Otley as controllers divert aircraft inbound for Leeds Bradford Airport to other destinations—Manchester and East Midlands—and cancel flights that haven’t yet departed. A full-scale investigation is going to shut the runway for at least a day. Phones begin ringing in bedrooms near Crawley, as the duty desk officer at the Civil Aviation Authority calls up crash investigators to set them in motion; but before they can ready a light plane to take them to the scene in Yorkshire, things go from bad to worse.

  First comes the
news of the disappearance of AZ-602 from radar screens over North Yorkshire. Then AA-759 issues its mayday call and diverts towards Liverpool, and finally the Air Force controllers at Scampton announce that there is a hostile incursion in British airspace. At which point the controllers in the NATS center in West Drayton put their doomsday scenario into operation: to shut down British airspace to all civilian flights and bring all airports to a complete ground stop.

  It’s happened twice before in as many decades: first on September 11, 2001, and again in April 2010 when the volcano Eyjafjallajökull erupted, spewing an ash cloud into the skies over Europe. NATS has a plan to handle such a shutdown. First, aircraft leaving British airspace are cleared to continue—but incoming flights are directed to airports on the continent, and new departures are cancelled. Luckily for everyone, it’s the early hours of a Sunday morning, and Paris and Amsterdam can absorb the inbound intercontinental traffic. But the NATS shutdown propagates to EUROCONTROL, forcing most flights outbound from Western Europe to North America to make long diversions or cancel; and then the incoming red-eyes need to find new destinations, from Dublin and Shannon to Paris and Madrid.

  Then Scampton notifies EUROCONTROL that the RAF have lost a fighter in air-to-air combat, and within an hour European airspace closes down from Ireland to Warsaw.

  * * *

  “Are you sure this is safe?” asks Pete, as Pinky tightens the buckle on the back of his cuirass and passes him the first gauntlet.

  “Fuck no!” Pinky’s head-shake jangles tunelessly, scraping metal on metal. “You really shouldn’t be doing this, Vicar. Not your party at all. You’ve got a wife and kid to be thinking about.”

  “I’m thinking of them. I’m thinking.” Also a congregation who’ve probably forgotten I exist and a bishop who definitely hasn’t, Pete adds mentally. “What happens if we don’t do this?”

  “I don’t know. Probably we don’t die. I mean, maybe probably. Possibly maybe probably.” Pinky passes him the other gauntlet. “Think you can see to drive in that thing?”

  “Once I’ve got it adjusted.” Pete finds the seventeenth-century helmet problematic, but not impossible. “I think I can make it work as long as I take things easy.”

  “Well then.” There’s a resounding clatter and clash from the back as Pinky climbs onto the rear bench seat. “Do you know the way to the bunker?”

  “Yes. First I need to get us out of this car park and onto the Inner Loop, then—”

  There is an echoing clash of metal on metal as Pete clambers over Ilsa’s side and gets himself settled on the motorcycle-style saddle without impaling himself on any bits of armor. “Hey, this fits.”

  “It’s cavalry armor: of course you can sit on a saddle!”

  More importantly, Pete notes, they’re both covered from head to foot with low-carbon steel. Ilsa’s bucket-shaped body keeps his lower legs screened, and Pinky has some kind of chain mail horse blanket to wrap around his lower half. When Ops Control down south finally act on Lockhart’s request to fire up the SCORPION STARE grid around the Inner Loop, they’ll be able to move without bursting into flames: and if they’re not the only thing that can move without halting and catching fire, the minigun mounted on the trailer hitch will come in handy.

  “Dr. Russell.” His bluetooth headset still works, despite the tin can blocking most of his field of vision. “Sitrep, please.”

  Pete turns the key in the ignition and Ilsa wheezes for a few seconds before rumbling to life. “Engine running, about to leave the garage. We should be there in about ten, fifteen minutes at this time of night.”

  “Good. Be aware that after you leave we will be activating the autonomous camera network around the Inner Loop. Any thaum field over twenty milli-Parsons will trigger an automatic basilisk reflex; your personal wards alone exceed that flux level, so you should delay your return until you have received direct clearance.”

  “We’ve got armor—”

  “Armor or no armor,” Lockhart insists, “you do not approach this site without permission. Firstly, we have passive defenses that might still target you, secondly, there are machine guns on the roof, and thirdly, the Army are on the way. Do you understand?”

  “I totally don’t want to get shot by mistake.” Pete puts Ilsa into first gear, releases the clutch, and steers towards the exit ramp. “Are you going to—”

  “I’m transferring your call to an open speakerphone. Don’t hang up, we’ll keep it on mute until we need to talk to you; if you want anything, just shout.”

  * * *

  Alex may be only half-trained in the basics of combat invocation, but he has been studying beyond his coursework. He has spent the past six months trying to broaden his understanding of the esoteric sciences, and Jez Wilson has seen fit to give him extensive background reading privileges in the research archives. So when he finds himself standing on a darkling plain that stretches to infinity in all directions, beneath a blazing fractal sigil that spans the void from horizon to horizon, he looks for the silvery path: and then he says, “Fuck me, we’re standing on an unmasked affine spacelike brane and we can breathe?”

  “I love it when you talk technical”—Cassie grips his elbow—“but don’t stray from the path unless you want to wander forever.”

  Alex nods. The road is a ghostly trail of footprints, not a physical surface. Most ley line routes run along the surface of the real world, but this one dives through a different cosmos, thanks to the magi’s meddling. The plain is so featureless that he can tell that if he strays too far to see the trail he might never be able to rediscover it. “Your people explored this continuum?”

  “Some of it, a long time ago. There are more things here than ley lines. They discovered many treasures before they realized the unwisdom of opening gateways to other worlds. My ancestors tamed the dragons and the cavalry steeds. Took the ancestors of the lesser races as breeding stock,” Cassie explains as she walks along the path. She sounds nonchalant, but Alex is learning to read the tension in her ears. “Be careful before you rush to judgment.”

  “But, but slaves—”

  “Different species.” She shrugs. “Are dogs people? Do cows vote? They are part of your urük civilization, whether you listen to their wishes or not. The master race does not ask for the consent of barbarians before it brings them the benefits of civilization.” She stops, then turns and meets Alex’s shocked gaze. Her face is as composed as a mask. Shaken, he wonders for a moment if her earlier displays of passion, hiding this total lack of affect, were feigned. But then she explains: “My father is the All-Highest. This is not merely his opinion, this is the truth of my People. It has always been that way among them. Power belongs to the strong in muscle or in mind, love is weakness and a source of shame. Your tongue has a word for it—psychopathy—and if you approach him expecting urük—human—values, he will kill you without a second thought.”

  “You said them.”

  Cassie’s gaze flickers away, although her expression remains frozen. “I’m flawed,” she admits. “Spying is one of the few vocations in which empathy is a useful trait that is open to a Person of noble blood. My mother protected me from the consequences of my weakness, saw me established in my calling—but she is dead.” For a moment the shell cracks, revealing something like grief. But then Cassie composes her face again. “Remember this: when we arrive, any sign of vulnerability or compassion will be seen as weakness, on my part as much as on yours.” She allows her cheek to twitch. “Pretend you have had Botox treatment, YesYes? And once we arrive, whatever happens, show no affection.”

  Alex swallows. His hunger is a silvery, burning ache, but contained: his power is awake inside his skin, leaving him feeling omnipotent, ready for anything. Ready, if he can, to help Cassie discharge her lethal curse, then rush her to safety. Ready to—

  She’s walking and he’s following her. Her back is turned, as if to afford him room to do wha
tever it is that she is hoping for yet refusing to admit. Whatever she thinks he should be doing, if he were a sufficiently ruthless, cold, sociopathic manipulator to be a worthy match for a spy of the People. Alex mentally pinches himself, then pulls out his phone, falling behind as he stares at it. No signal. Well, of course Vodafone doesn’t provide cell service in hyperspace, but that doesn’t stop him from composing an email and queuing it to go out as soon as they reach the far end of the diverted ley line. Assuming she’s right and it surfaces somewhere else in his own world, rather than in her father’s headquarters underhill, it should update Lockhart and the DM on the situation. Next he composes a couple of text messages—their significance explained in the preliminary email—that will light the fuse on a deadly chain of events when he hits the send button. (Assuming, again, that he lives long enough to do so: and that the appropriate authorities receive them.) Finally, he starts the remote monitoring server on the phone and tells it to keep updating his location via GPS. It’ll run the battery down sooner rather than later, but that can’t be helped. This will all be over in a few hours and if they do what he suggests he’ll have to get a new phone anyway. Assuming he survives.

  They walk for what feels like hours beneath the bizarre fractal burning in the empty darkness that passes for a sky. They walk until Alex can feel the soles of his feet aching, until the sigil in the void seems to turn and spawns blazing streamers of dust that contains universes. They walk until a blazing blue circle appears in the distance, at the far end of the ley line through the continuum of the dream roads. Then Cassie stops and beckons him forward. “What,” he says.

  “This.” A moment later she’s in his arms, shaking, clutching at him.

  “What,” he repeats. She silences him with a kiss. He hugs her and they mash their lips together, clumsy with desperation.