The Atrocity Archives

by Charles Stross

  "Why are they after me?"

  Oh, that truth. I manage to breathe again. "Your . . . research. And the stuff you were really working on in the States."

  "You know about that." She looks tense and I suddenly wonder, How many secrets are we keeping from each other?

  "Angleton told me about it. Black Chamber notified us when they deported you. Don't look so startled. About the restricted theoretical work on probability manipulation–lucky vectors, fate quantisation? It's all classified, but it's not–no, what I mean to say is, they don't like us running around on their turf, but information sharing goes on at different levels."

  I point my skewer at her and dissemble creatively. "That stuff is fairly serious juju in our field. The Pentagon plays with it. We've got it. A couple of other countries have occult operations groups who make use of destiny entanglement fields. But the likes of Yusuf Qaradawi can't get his hands on it without a hell of a lot of reverse engineering, any more than the provisional IRA ever got their hands on cruise missile technology. The difference is, to build a cruise missile takes a ton of aerospace engineers, an advanced electronics industry, and factories. Whereas to build a scalar field that can locally boost probability coefficients attached to a Wigner's Friend observer–say, to allow a suicide bomber to walk right through a ring of bodyguards as if they aren't there–takes a couple of theoreticians and one or two field ops. Occult weapons are so much more portable that you can think in terms of stealing the infrastructure–if you've got people who can understand it. As most nongovernmental activist groups rely on cannon fodder so dumb they have 'mom' and 'dad' tattooed on their knuckles so the cops know who they belong to, that isn't usually much of a threat."

  "But." She raises her last satay and swallows the skewered morsel. "This time there is." I see motion outside the window: see a familiar face, little more than a pale blur in the darkness, glance inside as it walks past.

  "Evidently," I mumble, feeling guilty.

  "So your bosses decided to trail me in public and see what they picked up while trying to identify the group by way of the museum basement," she adds briskly. "How many people are watching us, Bob?"

  "At least one right now," I say, heart bouncing around my rib cage. "That I know of, I mean. This is supposed to be a full top-and-tail job, guards outside the hotel and round the clock watch on your movements. Same as most politicians at risk of assassination get. Not that we're expecting any suicide bombers," I add hastily.

  She smiles at me warmly: "I'm so pleased to know that. It really makes me feel secure."

  I wince. "Can you suggest any alternatives?" I ask.

  "Not from your boss's–what's his name? Angleton? His point of view. No, I don't suppose there is." A waiter appears silently and removes our plates. She looks at me with an expression that I can't read. "Why are you here, Bob?"

  "Uh . . ." I pause to get my thoughts in order. "Because it's my mess. I got roped in because I didn't follow procedures and hang you out to dry in California, and then I was there when things turned nasty, and this whole mess is classified up to stupid levels because there's a turf war going on between project management and operational executive–"

  "That's not what I meant." She's silent for a moment. Then: "Why did you break the rules in Santa Cruz? Not that I object, but . . ."

  "Because"–I inspect my wineglass–"I like you. I don't think leaving people I like in the shit is a good way to behave. And, frankly, I don't have a very professional attitude to my work. Not the way the spooks think I should."

  She leans forward. "Do you have a more professional attitude to your work now?"

  I swallow. "No, not really."

  Something–a foot–rubs up and down my ankle and I nearly jump out of my skin. "Good." She smiles in a way that turns my stomach to jelly, and the waiter arrives with a precariously balanced pile of dishes before I can say anything and risk embarrassing myself. We just stare at each other until he's gone, and she adds: "I hate it when people let their professionalism get in the way of real life."

  * * * *

  We eat, and we talk about people and things, not necessarily in complimentary terms. Mo explains what it's like to be married to a New York lawyer and I commiserate, and she asks me what it's like to live with a manic-depressive psycho bitch from hell, and evidently she's been talking to Pinky and Brains about things because I find myself describing my relationship with Mhari with sufficient detachment that it might as well be over–ancient history. And she nods and asks if running into Mhari in Accounts and Payroll isn't embarrassing and this leads to a long discourse on how working for the Laundry is about as embarrassing as things can get: from the paper clip audits to the crazy internal billing system, and about how I hoped that getting into field ops would get me out from under Bridget's thumb, but no such luck. And Mo explains about tenure track backbiting politics in small American university departments, and about why you can kiss your career goodbye if you publish too much–as well as too little–and about the different ways in which a dual-income no-kiddies couple can self-destruct so messily that I'm left thinking maybe Mhari isn't that unusual after all.

  We end up walking back to the hotel arm in arm, and under a broken streetlamp she stops, wraps her arms around me, and kisses me for what feels like half an hour. Then she rests her chin on my shoulder, beside my ear. "This is so good," she whispers. "If only we weren't being followed."

  I tense. "We're–"

  "I don't like being watched," she says, and we let go of each other simultaneously.

  "Me neither." I glance round and see a lone guy on the street behind us looking in the window of a closed shop, and all the romance flees the evening like gas from a punctured balloon. "Shit."

  "Let's just . . . go back. Hole up and wait for morning."

  "I guess."

  We start moving again and she takes my hand. "Great evening out. Try it again some time?"

  I smile back at her, feeling both regret and optimism. "Yeah."

  "Without the audience."

  We reach the hotel, share a last drink, and head for our separate rooms.

  * * * *

  I dream of wires. Dark landscape, cold mud. Something screams in the distance; lumpy shapes strung up on barbed wire stretched before the fortress. The screams get louder and there's a rumbling and crashing and somewhere in the process I become aware that I'm not dreaming–someone is screaming, while I lie in bed halfway between sleeping and waking.

  I'm on my feet almost before I realise I'm awake. I grab a T-shirt and jeans, somehow slide my feet into both legs simultaneously and I'm out the door within ten seconds. The corridor is silent and dim, the only lighting coming from the overhead emergency strips; it's narrow, too, and by night the pastel-painted walls form a claustrophobic collage of grey-on-black shadows. Silence–then another scream, muffled, coming from upstairs. It's definitely human and it doesn't sound like anything you'd expect to hear from a hotel room at night. I pause for a moment, feeling silly as I consider that particular possibility–then duck back into my room and grab the multitool and the palmtop I've left atop the dresser. Now I head for the staircase.

  Another scream and I take the steps two at a time. A door opens behind me, a tousled head poking out and mumbling, "I'm trying to sleep . . ."

  The hair on my arms stands on end. The stair rail is glowing a faint, eerie blue; sparks sting my bare feet as I climb, and the handle of the fire door at the top of the stairs gives me a nasty shock. Air sighs past me, a thin breeze blowing along the corridor where blue flickering outlines the door frames in darkness. Another scream and this time a thudding noise, then a muffled crash; I hear a door slam somewhere below me, then the shattering whine of a fire alarm going off.

  Mo is in the Plato suite. That's where the screams are coming from, where the wind blows–I hit the door with my shoulder as hard as I can, and bounce.

  "What is going on?"

  I glance round. A middle-aged woman, thin-faced and worried. "Fir
e alarm!" I yell. "I heard screaming in here. Can you get help?"

  She steps forward, waving a big bunch of keys: she must be the concierge. "Allow me." She turns the door handle and the key, and the door slams open inward as a gust of wind grabs us both and tries to yank us into the room. I grab her arm and brace my feet against the doorframe. Now there's a scream right in my ear, but she grabs my wrist with another hand and I wrestle her back into the corridor. A howling gale is blowing through the doorway, as if someone's punched a hole in the universe. I risk a glance round it and see–

  A hotel bedroom in chaos and disarray–wardrobe tumbled on the floor, bedclothes strewn everywhere–all the hallmarks of a fight, or a burglary, or something. But where in my room there's another door and then a cramped bathroom, here there's a hole. A hole with lights on the other side of it that cast sharp shadows across the damaged furniture. Stars, harsh and bright against the darkness of a flat, alien landscape shrouded in twilight.

  I pull my head back and gasp into the woman's ear: "Get everybody out of here! Tell them it's a fire! I'll get help!" She's half doubled-over from the wind but she nods and stumbles toward the staircase. I turn to follow, shocked, half-dazed. Where the hell have the watchers gone? We're supposed to be under surveillance, dammit! I look back toward the bedroom for a final glance through that opening that shouldn't be there. The wind batters at my back, a gale howling past my ears. The opening is the size of a large pair of doors, ragged bits of lath and wallpaper showing where the small gate ripped through the wall. Beyond it, rolling ground, deep cold; a valley with a still lake beneath the icy, unwinking stars that form no constellations I can recognize. Something dim frosts the sky; at first I think it's a cloud, but then I recognise the swirl–the arms of a giant spiral galaxy raised above a dim landscape not of this world.

  I'm freezing, the wind is trying to rip me through the doorway and carry me into the alien landscape–and there's no sign of Mo, nor of her abductor. She's in there somewhere, that's for sure. Whoever, whatever opened it was waiting for her to go to bed when we came back to the hotel. They left fragments of their geometry inscribed in bloody runes on the walls and floor. They'll have planned this, taken her for their own purposes–

  A hand grabs my arm. I jerk round: it's Alan, looking just as much like a schoolteacher as ever, wearing an expression that says the headmaster is angry. His other hand is wrapped around the grips of a very large pistol. He bends close and yells, "Let's get the fuck out of here!"

  No argument. He pulls me toward the fire door and we make our way down the stairs, shocked and frostbitten. The wind quietens behind us as we rush down to the ground floor, all the way to the bar where Angleton is waiting to be briefed.

  Chapter 7

  BAD MOON RISING

  The emergency gathers pace over the next three hours.

  When I glance out the front door I see a fire-control truck–a big lorry with a control room mounted on its load bed–squatting in the middle of the street outside the hotel, blue lights strobing against the darkness; a couple of pumps are drawn up on either side, and a gaggle of police vans are parked round the corner. Cops are busy buzzing around, evacuating everyone on the block from hotel and dwelling alike. The cover story is that there's a gas leak. The pump engines are real enough, but the control vehicle has nothing to do with the fire brigade: Angleton had it shipped into Holland before Mo and I arrived, just in case. It belongs to OCCULUS–Occult Control Coordination Unit Liaison, Unconventional Situations–the NATO occult equivalent of a NEST, or Nuclear Emergency Search Team. But while NEST operatives are really only trained to look for terrorist nukes, OCCULUS has to be ready for Armageddon in a variety of guises. I only just found out about OCCULUS and I really don't know whether or not I want to punch Angleton or just be grateful for his foresight.

  There's rack after rack of specialised communication equipment in the back of the truck, and a scarier bunch of paramilitaries than I've ever seen outside of a movie. They're poking around the hotel right now–sending in robots with cameras, installing sensors on the way up the staircase–laying the groundwork for whatever comes next.

  Alan leads me into the bar, where Angleton is waiting. Angleton has dark hollows under his eyes; his tie is loose and his collar unbuttoned. He's scribbling notes on a yellow pad in between snapping instructions on a mobile phone that's just about glued to his ear. "Sit down," he gestures as he listens to someone at the other end.

  "We ought to pull back to the amber zone," Alan says. "There's structural damage."

  "Later." Angleton waves him off and goes back to talking on the phone. "No, there's no need to go to Rung Four yet, but I want the backup wagon on twenty-four by seven alert, and we'll need Plumbers crawling over everything. And Baggers, but especially Plumbers. Tell Bridget to fuck off." He glances at me. "Grab a drink from the bar and get ready to tell me everything." Back to the phone: "I'll expect hourly updates." He puts the phone down and turns to me. "Now. Tell me exactly what happened."

  "I don't know what happened," I say. "I went to bed. Next thing, I hear screams and wake up–" I clench my fists to stop my hands shaking.

  "Fast forward. What did you find in her room?" Angleton leans forward intently.

  "How did you know . . . hell. I got up there, heard whistling like wind. So I tried to break the door down. Then the concierge showed up, unlocked the door, and nearly got sucked in; I grabbed her and sent her back down. There's a gate in there, class four at least–it's about two-plus metres in diameter, runs straight through the wall, and it's stable. Furniture was thrown around as if there was a fight, but there's a big wind blowing. On the other side of the gate there's no atmosphere to speak of."

  "No atmosphere." Angleton nods and makes a note as two firemen–I think they're firemen–enter the bar and begin setting up something that looks like a rack of industrial scaffolding in the middle of the room. "The source of the wind?"

  "I think so. It was bloody cold, which suggests expansion into vacuum." I shiver and glance up; above our heads the whistle of wind through rubble continues unabated. "She wasn't there," I add. "I think they took her."

  Angleton's lips quirk. "That is not an unreasonable deduction." His expression hardens. "Describe the other side of the gate."

  "Twilight, a shallow valley. I couldn't see the ground very clearly; it sloped down to a distant lake, or something that looked like one. The stars were very clear, not twinkling at all, and I could see they weren't familiar. There was a huge galaxy covering, uh, about a third of the sky."

  Alan sticks a glass between my fingers: I take an experimental swallow. Orange juice spiked with something stronger. I continue: "No air on the other side. Alien starscape. But there are stars, and at least one planet; that means it's pretty damn close to us, it's not one of those universes where the ratio of the strong nuclear force to the electromagnetic force prevents fusion." I shiver. "Whoever they are, they've got her and they've got an open mass-transfer gate. What do we do now?"

  Alan silently leaves the room. Angleton looks at me oddly. "That's a very good question. Do you have any ideas to contribute?" he asks.

  I swallow. "I have one idea. It's the Ahnenerbe, isn't it? That's the connection. The Middle Eastern guy, the one with the luminous eyes that she described–it's a possession. Something left over from the war, an Ahnenerbe revenant of some kind, possessing the leader of a Mukhabarat strike cell in California. And now they've snatched Mo."

  He closes his eyes. "Your email this afternoon. You are sure she positively identified the scan you sent me from California? You'd bet your life on it?"

  "Pretty sure." I nod. "Was it–"

  "We found the same pattern in Rotterdam." He sighs and opens his eyes again. "The very same; my compliments on your search criteria. Was there something similar in her room?"

  "I honestly can't say; it was dark, I was trying not to be dragged in by the wind, and the gate had instantiated in the middle of it. I don't think so, but if you can get a ph
otograph from up there I can confirm–"

  "In progress."

  Alan comes back in; he's wearing a bright orange overall and carrying a bulky box, some kind of sensor gear. "You'll have to move now," he tells Angleton. "The top floor's in danger of collapsing. Hole up in the van and stay out of the way; we need to sweep the block for werewolves."

  "Were–"

  I must look surprised because Alan barks a brief laugh at me. "Leftovers from the authors of this incursion, old boy, not hairy-palmed wolf-men with a silver allergy. Come on, shift yourself."

  "Shift–" I find myself on my feet, Angleton holding my elbow in a vicelike grip.

  "Come now, Mr. Howard. This is no time to lose your self-control." He steers me out into the street (barefoot, the tarmac under my toes makes me wince) and then up the steps into the OCCULUS command vehicle. A guard waves us in, insect-eyed in respirator. "A spare overall for Mr. Howard here," Angleton calls, and a minute later I'm loaded down with enough survival gear to equip a small polar expedition, from the y-fronts out.

  "You're going to send people in to try and close the gate," I predict in the general direction of the back of Angleton's head as he dials a phone number. "I want to go with them."

  "Don't be silly, boy. What do you think you can achieve?"

  "I can try to rescue her," I say.

  There's a burst of static from farther up the compartment and one of the men in black (black turtleneck, black fatigues, black face-paint, and MP-10 slung over his chair) turns and calls out: "Message for the captain!" Alan mutters a curse and squeezes past me. I begin pulling on a sock. There are one-way windows along one side of the cabin and outside in the road I see some kind of large truck squeezing past us.

  "I'm serious," I tell Angleton. "I know what's going on here, or most of it. Or I can guess. Werewolves, he said. Holdovers from the Reich, huh? And the Mukhabarat connection. That gate doesn't go into the dark anthropic zone; it stops short, somewhere where humans can exist. Really evil humans, whoever survived from the Ahnenerbe-SS after the war was lost." I begin to wriggle into the bottom half of my survival suit shell. "I've been studying Sheet 45075 from Birkenau, you know. If it's the same one they used over there, I can shut it down safely–without a massive discharge when it arcs to ground."