The Nightmare Stacks

by Charles Stross

  There were no survivors, and a steady trickle of police officers were going ominously dark, not answering their Airwave radios or mobile phones. Then news of the airliner accident near Otley arrived.

  Lockhart and his ad-hoc team were confronted with a terrible dilemma. Forecasting Ops specified some sort of incursion targeting HQ North. Dr. Schwartz had gone missing after reporting an incursion out past the ring road. Lockhart had already mobilized all available personnel in Leeds, opened up the arsenal in the archive stacks of the Royal Armouries museum, and sent bodies to lock down the approaches to the office complex. Requests to the Police to send additional forces had been ignored: the Leeds Met were overstretched and all their civil emergency plans assumed that support would arrive from the Ministry of Defense, not flow in the opposite direction. However, an embryonic defensive plan was taking shape.

  If Quarry House was really the target of whatever was coming, then Lockhart had a duty to defend the site. But with inadequate trained personnel on hand to mount a conventional defense of the site, Lockhart would have to activate the area defenses. Meanwhile, the Airwave receiver in the corner of the ops room was telling a terrifying story of escalation as successive police and emergency responders survived long enough to broadcast garbled partial reports.

  At half past nine in the morning, Lockhart picked up the phone to the Regional Camera Control Center attached to the Police HQ at Elland Road. “This is Quarry House incident commander. I’m calling for MAGINOT BLUE STARS at this time.” There was an exchange of authorizations, very formal: Lockhart (normally imperturbable) was seen to wipe his forehead with a tissue as he waited for acknowledgment. “Yes. Lima Sierra One to MAGINOT BLUE STARS, autonomous response at this time. Good. Activate it now.” He puts the phone down and glances at Jez Wilson, who’s watching: “So that’s done.”

  MAGINOT BLUE STARS is the Q-Division-approved software that co-opts many of the roadside and urban infrastructure cameras in British cities, building an ad-hoc Basilisk network. Developed specifically to deal with outbreaks of eaters in built-up areas, the SCORPION STARE network performs realtime target recognition and transmutation. It is best deployed when the civilian population it is intended to protect are locked down in their homes, under curfew, and only alien monsters roam the streets.

  Nine thirty on a Sunday morning in a city center is a good approximation for a lockdown situation. However, Colonel Lockhart had not performed a full risk assessment for the Inner Loop.

  Mea culpa: this is partly my fault. Lockhart had just received my email explaining in detail the arrangement I have come to with Cassie, and my proposed course of action. Approving it is above his pay grade (not to mention mine): he forwards it to the Gold Committee at the New Annex for consideration. He also cced it to the officer commanding OCCULUS Two, still somewhere on the M1 south of Sheffield, on the sensible working assumption that he should be ready to act should the Gold Committee (representing the Auditors, Operational Oversight, and Mahogany Row) approve my request. For their part, the Gold Committee would eventually escalate the issue to the Cabinet Office, where it would be delayed, finally bubbling to the top of the agenda of the COBRA meeting at four o’clock in the afternoon.

  (It’s reasonable to assume that my report was a major distraction, and contributed significantly to his information overload.)

  As part of the Leeds Regeneration Scheme, a number of high-density luxury apartment buildings had been built alongside the river over the past twenty years. There were also a number of budget hotels within a short distance of Leeds Railway Station. The student apartments on the north side of the city center were, thankfully, just outside the Inner Loop Lockdown Zone that Lockhart has requested, but the city center was not largely uninhabited early on a Sunday morning, contrary to Lockhart’s expectation.

  That in itself was not a critical error. SCORPION STARE uses a sophisticated neural network recognizer to identify and target proximate threats. Citizens unwittingly venturing out of their homes during curfew should be reasonably safe from the targeting algorithm—at least, reasonably safe compared to venturing outside in a city under siege by conventional forces, with rooftop snipers and random mortar fire to contend with.

  But Lockhart failed to take account of a second factor: the Animation Festival and Anime Convention taking place on the Wharf, a couple of blocks from the Royal Armouries. Nine thirty was still early, but hundreds of convention-goers were even then eating breakfast in the Ibis and Radisson hotels nearby, and within half an hour hundreds of them would begin to converge on foot with the Riverside Plaza and the Exhibition Centre. This was the largest Anime Convention yet held as part of the annual Leeds International Animation Festival, and many cosplaying fans were present in character as their favorite heroes and heroines of superhero and fantasy fiction.

  Pointy ears make the SCORPION STARE cameras track and focus intently. And the network responds to remote events: positive contacts nearby raise the weighting function by which a given node determines the probability that a target of interest may be another positive hit. As cameras in Headingley and out along Woodhouse Lane and the Armley Road repeatedly fail to lock onto elements of the Host (not to mention going up in puffs of smoke), the command and control system responds to defeat by lowering the recognition threshold. This is not a bug in the software, but an emergent hysteresis loop arising from the system repeatedly failing to recognize hostiles while under attack. While undergoing field tests in Whitby it persistently acquired a target lock on a certain Bride of Dracula, but as no targets were believed to be in the area this was discounted as a false positive, and the neural network was reweighted accordingly.

  The SCORPION STARE system is adaptive by design. Unfortunately it was initialized with a set of training data that is lethally corrupted, reducing its ability to discriminate friend from foe. And it’s about to go all Skynet in the middle of Leeds.

  * * *

  Third Wing of Airborne Strike has been having a frustrating morning.

  She has been airborne over Urükheim for almost an hour on a sortie that commenced shortly after dawn. Initial reports were promising. Air Defense have confirmed that the urük sky-carts are unarmored and unprotected against the basilisk’s death-stare. As her and her wingman’s steeds climbed and turned east, putting the rising sun in her eyes, she saw the rising plume of smoke from the pyre of an unwary enemy flyer in the distance. The heavy brigade’s path across the landscape is visible as a slashing line of trampled vegetation and burning buildings; where it travels along urük pavements her mount’s sharp-eyed vision discerns wrecked carts by the dozen. There’s nothing to do here; it will take her over half an hour to catch up with the Host, whose progress has been faster than anticipated.

  But as Third Wing and Sixth Wing climb she feels a sharp stab of pain at her temples, and gasps. Images slam into her human mind: the dying vision of another rider. Alien daggercraft, giant arrowheads in shape, lance through the skies above Urükheim at impossible speed, throwing firebolts tipped with explosives at dragons. They’re totally defenseless but terribly fast and they have fangs of their own, as Fourth Wing found out the hard way. Third Wing swears a horrible oath in the privacy of her own skull, then will-speaks her back-seater and the crew of her companion beast: “Did you see that?” she demands. “Eyes open, eyes open, stay low.”

  The two firewyrms descend, now skimming above the endless ribbon-curling roads of the urük countryside, barely higher than the curious poles festooned with ropes or cables that march alongside them.

  “I see no daggers,” says Sixth. “How about our top cover?”

  “Too far to the rear once we close on target.” Basilisks are a line-of-sight air defense weapon, and now Third Wing is swearing with even more reason: they are cumbersome and slow to move, and the sky above the enemy palace is beyond their extreme range. Wings Three and Six will be on their own if they encounter more daggercraft, and they’re flying s
traight into the rising sun. It’s not a good place to be, and Third spends the next half hour with a cold tension-sweat of focus trickling down her spine as the dragons race to catch up with the ground force ahead, whose mobile screen may yet afford them some degree of protection.

  They are close to their goal when a new hail comes in: “Salutations! Our forward columns have engaged enemy irregulars near a major road junction on the edge of the urük hive. We are taking light fire from elements arriving from the east. Our flank needs cover: Can you backtrack to their origin and stop them?”

  This is the sort of close support mission that Third Wing relishes, and she bares her teeth happily as she signals her assent. To Sixth Wing and their respective magi, she commands: “Follow me!” Then she turns due east, cutting across country towards a large turnpike she glimpsed in the distance before descending to treetop height.

  Third Wing intends to circle around and come in from the northwest at low altitude, taking the urük resistance on the circular highway from behind and subjecting them to a gentle drizzle of wyrmspit and a brisk volley of death spells. Their reported lack of defenses works in her favor, and she’ll be coming at them out of the sun: they’ll die before they get an opportunity to aim their bolt-throwers at her receding tail.

  What Third Wing has no way of knowing is that the distant highway she is approaching from the west as a waypoint for her approach is the A1(M): specifically the segment of that motorway between Wetherby and Leeds currently occupied by Lieutenant Cook’s south-bound Sabre squadron with its light tanks, armored cars, and Starstreak laser-guided air defense missiles.

  Lieutenant Cook has just received the first threat warning over the air and announced, “Eyes up, we have airborne incoming!” when Third Wing soars over the treeline to the west of the motorway.

  To human eyes, a firewyrm of the Host in full battle trim is immediately identifiable as a monstrous threat. If you can see it at all without throwing up or going blind, what you perceive is a rippling knot of curved air wrapped around a barrel-shaped horror with webbed wings articulated on a bony skeleton quite unlike a bat or pterosaur. An eyeless, tentacle-rimmed circular maw breathes straw-colored fumes (and if you are close enough to see that, your eyes will soon start to cloud over with chemical burns). Carbuncular metal capsules with mirrored portholes are strung along its spine and dangle to either flank. Its legs are vestigial, little more than paddles to assist its crawl across the purulent swamps of its homeworld. It’s as unearthly as a nightmare out of an Alien franchise movie, and just as shocking to the eye.

  A third of Cook’s troops are looking in roughly the right direction when Third Wing comes into view. Of these, roughly half actually see what’s in front of their eyes: the wyrm’s anti-observation countermeasures are compromised by encountering such a dense clump of observers from a single direction. Gasps and involuntary screams instantly reduce the voice-cued radio channel to a sea of noise. Cook himself sees the outline of his own death bleeding through the sudden migrainaceous visual disturbance—and he’s never had a migraine in his life—like something out of a florid fever-dream. He freezes for a second, then keys the override on the local voice channel: “Shoot! Shoot!”

  Of the twenty-six men staring in the direction of the enemy, three faint, eleven are unable to process any visual information for the next five to fifteen minutes, six throw up, and two undergo immediate convulsions, in one case leading to a subarachnoid hemorrhage and death. The remaining five effectives hear Cook’s order and light up the target. A second later the other effectives in the squadron recognize the threat and join in.

  . . . Meanwhile, to the eyes of an alfär dragonrider, a Sabre squadron deploying in convoy along a motorway doesn’t look much different from any other queue of urük-carts. So far, Third Wing has seen hundreds of the things, many of them crashed and broken at the side of roads. Perhaps if Third Wing was not approaching them from the west, squinting against the sun, Third Wing might have realized that a number of these carts are different—squat, windowless boxes of curiously uniform color, their wheels running on endless looped belts quite unlike any cart the wyrm crews have seen before. But tracked vehicles in general and tanks in particular are as alien to the Host’s training as dragons are to a British Army armored cavalry unit’s background. And even if Third Wing was in a position to identify the traffic ahead of her as hostile, she would be at a complete loss to spot the difference between a Scimitar light reconnaissance tank and the Stormer HVM at the back of the queue: a similar chassis capped by a battery of Starstreak laser-guided antiaircraft missiles instead of a turret-mounted cannon.

  Two GPMGs and then a 30mm cannon roar to life almost simultaneously, elevating to track the dragon spiraling above the treetops. With less than two hundred meters’ separation, Third Wing doesn’t stand a chance: her eyes widen as the road in front of her flickers red and opens her mouth to cry out just as a burst of armor-piercing bullets rip through the canopy of her magi’s palanquin. The sorcerer torches off immediately, burning like a magnesium flare; meanwhile, her mount gives voice to an ululating shriek of agony as it curls around its gut-shot abdomen and rolls into the coppice below, bleeding wyrmspit through wounds the size of fists.

  When it hits the ground, it explodes.

  Sixth Wing has barely any more warning. Flying in echelon three hundred meters behind Third Wing, he’s shocked by the stab of pain from his flight-liege’s mind. “Contact ahead!” he shouts at his magus, who is already releasing an angry hornet-swarm of death curses at the still-hidden enemy sheltering behind the trees. He desperately whips his mount into a writhing turn, begins to drop down to brush the treetops, and then he’s out of time.

  The HVM carrier’s crew are both looking in the right direction when Lieutenant Cook’s warning comes in, for their job is to provide close-range air cover for the convoy and the rumor of enemy airborne attackers have preceded the dragons. The commander is one of those incapacitated by first sight of Third Wing’s monstrous steed, projectile vomiting around the interior of the fighting compartment. But his gunner is merely sickened, and he points his first missile straight at the middle of the whirlpool of nausea in the sky and hits the firing stud. There’s no time to compute windage and no need for superelevation: he just aims the laser designator and fires.

  Sixth Wing is barely five hundred meters away. That’s just far enough for the missile’s second stage to hit Mach 4 and burn out, then dispense the three laser-guided explosive darts it carries. Starstreak is a small missile, lacking the target identification and tracking features of the Typhoon’s ASRAAM: this is a strength, not a weakness, when fighting the mind-warping magic of the alfär. Before the gunner has time to relax his trigger finger two of the darts punch into Sixth Wing’s mount. And if the explosion of a dragon on ground impact was violent, the blast from the air burst sends trees flying like wooden shrapnel.

  Meanwhile, half a dozen curses fizzle green and ground themselves out on the unfortunates trapped in the aluminum-hulled light tanks and their escort of armored cars. Sixth Wing’s magus had no identification guide to the enemy, so his undirected spasm of fire lands at random. Where it strikes, men and women die. An escorting police car veers off the carriageway and crashes, the driver’s headless torso still clutching the wheel. Two of the Panthers follow it, and a Scimitar suddenly skids and begins to turn in place on its tracks, a macabre fusillade of popcorn sounds reverberating from inside its hull as ammunition ignited by the burning corpses of its crew cooks off.

  Lieutenant Cook draws a shuddering breath—trying not to throw up—and tenses. “What was that?” he demands, unable to bottle it in. He glances at Sergeant Magnusson, who is frozen in his seat, staring towards the fireballs rising behind the trees lining the motorway verge. He takes another breath, feeling the warmth on his cheeks. “Sitrep, Sergeant.” Magnusson doesn’t react. “Sit—”

  As he pokes Magnusson’s shoulder the sergeant slowly to
pples sideways.

  “—rep.” Jim stares for a moment. Then he keys his mike again. Unnaturally calm, he hears words coming from his mouth, as if from a distance: “Medic, Panther One, man down, man down. All vehicles, sitrep by numbers, report casualties . . .”

  * * *

  Nothing (8,224).

  Nothing (8,225).

  Nothi—

  Alex has been alone in the circle of salt in the tent for ages. His knees are beginning to ache and he’s shivering with tension and a creeping sense of dread. But he’s got an ace up his sleeve. As soon as they left him alone he subvocalized a word of command and his counter macro was up and spinning in the edge of his vision. He keeps his gaze locked on the circle of salt, but its power to drag him in is broken. And so he is free to think.

  He’s had too long to come up with questions and not enough time to come up with answers to his liking. Questions like, if they don’t have a lock-up for prisoners, what does that say about how they look after them? Or how do I know she hasn’t already been murdered by her stepmother? And why don’t I send the first SMS alert now?