"I was asleep," she says. "I remember a dream–howling air, very cold, being carried somewhere, unable to move. Like being paralysed, scary as hell and I couldn't breathe. Then I woke up down here. He was leaning over me. My head aches like the mother of all hangovers. What happened?"
"Did he say anything?" I ask. "Make any adjustments?"
"He said I'd served my purpose and this would be my final contribution. His eyes, they were really weird. Luminous. What do you mean, make adjust–" She tries to raise her head and the bed creaks. There's an ominous buzzing sound from the control panel at the far side of the room and a red light comes on.
"Oh shit," I say, as the door opens and two soldiers in vacuum gear come in and the lights flicker. I see the chandelier-like thing above Mo sway on its ropes, hear the bedframe creak. As she gathers breath to scream I clumsily jump onto the bed and brace myself on hands and knees above her. "Someone cut the fucking cables, pull her out, and cut the fucking wires!" I yell. I'm kneeling on one of them when the descending mass of obsidian and bone and wire lands on my backpack with a crunch–and I discover the hard way that the thing is electrified, and Mo is wired to earth.
* * * *
My head is spinning, I feel nauseous, and my right knee feels like it's on fire. What am I doing–
"Bob, we're going to pull it off you now. Can you hear me?"
Yeah, I can hear you. I want to throw up. I grunt something. The crushing weight on my back begins to lift. I blink stupidly at the wooden slats in front of me, then someone grabs my arm and tries to pull me sideways. Their touch hurts; someone, maybe me, screams, and someone else yells "Medic!"
Seconds or minutes later I realise that I'm lying on my back and someone is pounding on my chest. I blink and try to grunt something. "Can you hear me?" they say.
"Yeah–oof."
The pounding stops for a moment and I force myself to breathe deeply. I know I should be lying on something, but what? I open my eyes properly. "Oh, that wasn't good. My knee–"
Alan leans over my field of view; people are bustling about behind him. "What was that all about?" he asks.
"Is Mo–"
"I'm all right, Bob." Her voice comes from right behind me. I start, and it feels like someone's clubbed me behind the ear again–my head is about to split open. "That–thing–" her voice is shaky.
"It's an altar," I say tiredly. "Should have recognised the design sooner. Alan, the bad guy is loose here. Somewhere. Mo was bait for a trap."
"Explain," Alan says, almost absent-mindedly. I roll my head round and see that Mo is sitting with her back to the wall, legs stretched out in front of her; someone's given her one of the red survival suits, no good in vacuum but enough to keep her warm, and she's got a silver foil blanket stretched around her shoulders. Behind her, the altar is a splintered wreck.
"It's not so hard to open a gate and bring an information entity through, especially if you've got a body ready and waiting for it at the other end, right? Physical gates are harder, and the bigger you want 'em, the more energy or life you have to expend to stabilize it. Anyway, this is an altar; there are a couple like it in the basement of that museum we came to visit. You put the sacrifice on the altar, wire it to an invocation grid, and kill the victim–that's what the chandelier was for–channelling what comes back out. Only this one–the guards and wards around the altar are buggered. They'd offer no protection at all once the summoning was manifest, and the thing would take over anyone it could come into contact with. Transfer by electrical conduction, that's how a lot of these things spread."
"So you tried to shield her with your body," says Alan, "How touching!"
"Huh." I cough and wince at the answering pain in my head. "Not really; I figured the scaffold wouldn't be able to cut through my air tanks. And if it killed her we'd all be dead, anyway."
"What was it set up to summon?" Mo asks. Her voice still hoarse.
"I don't know." I frown. "Nothing friendly, that's for sure. But then, this isn't the Ahnenerbe, is it? Even though they built this place, they've been dead for a long time. Suicide, by the look of it. This bastard's some kind of possessor entity–jumps from body to body. It's been shadowing you from the States, but when it got you all it did was use you as raw material in a summoning sacrifice. Doesn't make sense, does it? If it wanted you so bad, why not just walk up to you, shake hands, and move into your head?"
"It doesn't matter right now." Alan stands. "We're leaving soon. According to Roland the gate's shrinking; we've got about four hours to pull out, and your mystery kidnapper hasn't tried to make a break for it. What we're going to do is put a guard on the gate, get the hell out of here, and leave the demo charge ticking. He won't be able to sneak back around us, and the gadget will toast what's left of this place."
"Uh-huh. How's my tankage?"
"Dented, and your suit front panel is blown–it took the brunt of the charge, otherwise you'd be a crispy critter right now. Look, I'm going to get things organised in person, seeing all our radios are flaking out." Alan looks round. "Hutter, get these people sorted out and ready to pull back; I want them both mobile within the hour, we've got a lot of shit to move out of here." He glances down at me and winks. "You've done well."
Over the course of the next fifteen minutes I recover enough to sit up against the wall, and Mo just about manages to stop shivering. She leans against me. "Thank you," she says quietly. "That went way beyond–"
Hutter and Chaitin bang in through the door, heaving a couple of bulky kit-bags full of assorted gear: vacuum support underwear, heated outer suit, a new regulator and air tank for my framework, a new backpack and helmet for Mo. "Look at the lovebirds," Chaitin says, apparently amused by us. "On your feet, pretties, got to get you ready to move and ain't nobody going to carry you."
While Hutter is getting Mo into her pressure gear I stumble around the wreckage of the procrustean bed and hunt for my palmtop–dropped when I had to leap for her life. I find it lying on the concrete floor, evidently kicked into a corner of the room, but it's undamaged, which is a big relief. I pick it up and check the thaum level absently, and freeze: something is really not right around here. Following the display I trail around the walls until I find an inexplicably high reading in front of that rack of high tension switchgear. Something is happening here: local entropy is sky-high as if information is being destroyed by irreversible computation in the vicinity. But the rack is switched off. I pocket the small computer and give the rack an experimental yank; I'm nearly knocked off my feet when it slides toward me.
"Hey!" Chaitin is right behind me, shoving me out of the way and pointing his gun into the dark cavity behind the rack.
"Don't," I say tersely. "Look." I switch on my suit headlamp, and promptly wish I hadn't.
"Oh Jesus." Chaitin lowers his gun but doesn't look away. The room behind the instrument rack is another cell: it must have been undisturbed for a long time, but it's so cold that most of the body parts are still recognisable. There's a butcher's shop miasma hanging over it, not decay, exactly, but the smell of death. Enough spare parts for Dr. Frankenstein to make a dozen monsters lie heaped in the room, piled in brown-iced drifts in the corners. "Shut the fucking door," he says distantly, and steps out of my way.
"Anyone got a hacksaw?" I ask.
"You can't be serious–" Chaitin pushes up his visor and stares at me. "Why?"
"I want to take samples from the top few bodies," I say slowly. "I think they may be something to do with the Mukhabarat's Santa Cruz operation."
"You're nuts," he says.
"Maybe, but don't you want to know who these people were?"
"No fucking way, mate," he says. Then he breathes deeply. "Look, I was in Bosnia, y'know, the mass graves?" He glances down and scuffs the floor. "Spent a couple of weeks guarding the forensics guys one summer. The worst thing about those pits, you scrubbed like crazy but in the end you had to throw your boots away. Once that smell gets into the leather it won't leave." He looks away.
"You're fucking out of your skull if you think I'm going to help you take trophies."
"So just get me an axe," I snap irritably. (Then I wince again and wish I hadn't.) He looks at me oddly for a moment, as if trying to make his mind up whether or not to get physical, then turns and stomps off.
When Chaitin returns he's carrying a fireman's axe and an empty kit-bag. He leaves me alone for ten minutes while I discover just how difficult it is to chop through the wrist bones of a corpse that's been frozen for days or months. I find that I'm angry, very angry indeed–so angry, in fact, that the job doesn't upset me. I want to find the bastard who did this and give him a taste of his own medicine, and if chopping off dead hands is the price then it's a price I'm happy to pay–with interest.
But why do I still feel as if I'm missing something obvious? Like, maybe, what the demon–dybbuk, possessor, whatever-you-call-it–lured us here for?
Chapter 9
BLACK SUN
When I come out of the cellar clutching my grisly handbag, Hutter and Mo are gone. Chaitin is stooging around, shuffling from foot to foot as he waits for me. "Let's go," he says, so I heft the bag at him.
"Got it." We head back up the corridor past the glow-tubes and I glance over my shoulder just once, breath steaming in the frigid air. Then I lower my visor and lock it in place, check my regulator, and listen to the hiss of cool air through my helmet. "Where is everybody?"
"Boss man's up top arming the gadget; your squeeze is on her way back to the gateway."
"Great," I say, and I mean it. This place is getting to me; I almost want to dance a little jig at the thought of blowing it to atoms. "Did anybody find any documentation?"
"Documentation? Tons of it. These guys were Germans, dude. You ever worked with the fucking Wehrmacht, you'd be able to tell a story about documentation, too."
"Huh." We hit the bottom of the stairs. Scary Spice is waiting for us.
"Go on up," he says to Chaitin. He stops me: "You, wait." He twists a dial on my chest pack: "Hear me?"
"Yeah," I say, "loud and clear. Has anyone seen any sign of the bastard who kidnapped Mo?"
"The target, you mean?" Scary hefts his heavily insulated gun and for a moment I'm glad I can't see through his face mask. "Naah, but you're going up the stairs right now and I'm following you, and if you see anyone behind me yell like hell."
"That," I say fervently, "is fine by me." Already the shadows are lengthening as the glow-tubes slowly burn out.
There's crosstalk and terse chatter all over the radio channel Scary has tuned me to; I get the impression of three teams retreating to prearranged positions, keeping their eyes peeled for company. Some evil bastard demon has been here in the past couple of hours, wearing a stolen body: Can't we move faster? Evidently not. "Timer set to seven thousand seconds by my mark," Alan cuts in on the common channel. "This is your hundred and ten minute warning, folks. I've pulled the spoiler chain and the initiator is now live; anyone still here in two hours better have some factor one-billion sunblock. Sound off by name."
Everyone seems to be accounted for, except the three outside. "Okay, pull out in LIFO order. Scary, Chaitin, make sure Howard's in tow and cycle when ready."
"Right, boss." Chaitin. "C'mon, you, let's go."
"Okay." I wait while Chaitin cycles through the airlock into the garage, then open the door and squeeze into the cramped closetlike space. "I'm on tank one, everything working."
"It better be. Okay, cycle yourself through."
I wait for a tense two minutes while the air hisses out of a tiny tube and I feel the pressure suit tightening around me. Oddly, I begin to feel warmer once I'm in partial vacuum; the chilly air in the redoubt was sapping my body heat. Presently the outer door swings open. "Move, move!"
I walk out into the garage, open doors gaping at the ink-black sky, then out into the courtyard in front of the building. Chaitin's waiting there. Someone's parked that electric trolley next to the wall, but the little half-track thing with a motorcycle's front wheel is missing. "Someone taking souvenirs?" I ask.
A burst of static that I just about decode as "What?" tells me that the interference is worse than before; I glance up and see red stars, a dull red swirl of galaxy overhead . . . a distinct pink tinge to the moon, in fact.
I point at where the Kettenkrad was parked. "There, it's gone," I say. "Who took it?"
Chaitin shrugs. I look round. "Go there." He points at the main gatehouse. I start walking. The moonlight is dim, rosy: either I'm reeling lightheaded or . . . or what?
It's about a kilometre to the wall where our unseen enemy opened the gate to Amsterdam, and with no sign of him in the vicinity I have time to do a little bit of thinking. Looking straight up I see only darkness; the visible stars mostly stretched in a wide belt above the horizon, the moon an evil-faced icon staring down at us. The power to suck all the life and heat out of a planet like this–it's horrifying. While a sacrificial murder will get you a hot-line to a demon capable of possessing you, or a window to some universe so alien you can't comprehend its physical laws, it takes a lot of power to open a physical gate to another version of the Earth. Shadow Earths interfere with each other, and it's very difficult to generate congruence. But whatever happened here . . .
I try to picture what might have happened. I can only come up with two scenarios:
Scenario one. An Ahnenerbe detachment in Germany, some time in April of 1945. They know they're losing, but defeat is not an acceptable option to them. They quickly gather all the supplies they can: foodstuffs, machine tools, seeds, fuel. Using a handful of captured enemy POWs, a gate is opened to somewhere cold and airless where they can wait out the hue and cry before making a break for home.
Nope, that doesn't work. How'd they build this fortress? Or mess with the moon?
Scenario two. A divergent history; a different branch of our own universe, so close to our own timeline that the energy it takes to open a full bridge between the two realities approximates the mass-energy of the universe itself. The point of departure, the fork in the river of time, is an invocation the Ahnenerbe attempted late in the war–but not too late. It's an act of necromancy so bloody that the priests of Xipe Totec would have cringed in horror, so gruesome that Himmler would have protested. They opened a gateway. We thought it was just a tactical move, a way to move men and materials about without being vulnerable to Allied attack–shunt them into another world, travel across it bypassing their enemies, then open a gateway back to our own continuum. But what if they were doing something more ambitious? What if they were trying to open a channel to one of the nameless places where the infovores dwell: beings of near-infinite cold, living in the darkened ghosts of expanded universes that have succumbed to the ancient forces of proton decay and black hole evaporation? Invoking Godlike powers to hold their enemies at bay, the forces of the Red Army and the Western Allies are held in check . . .
What happened next?
Pacing through the petrified forest I can see it as clearly as a television documentary. A wind of desolation and pain screams out of the heart of Europe, hurling bombers from the skies like dandelion seeds. A darkness rises in the west, a maelstrom that sucks Zukhov's divisions in like splinters of a shattered mast sent flying in a hurricane. The SS necromancers are exultant: their demons harrow the Earth in stolen bodies, scouring it clean of enemy forces, eating the souls of the untermenschen and spitting up their bones. Snow falls early as fimbulwinter sets in, for the ice giants of legend have returned to do the bidding of the thousand-year Reich, and the Fuhrer's every dream shall be made real. A pale sun that warms nothing gazes down across a wilderness of ice and fire, ravaged by the triumph of the will.
They only realise how badly they'd miscalculated some months later as the daylight hours shorten, and shorten further–until the equinox passes, the temperature continues to fall as the sunlight dims, and the giants cease to do their bidding.
Gotterdammerung has come for the victorious Third Reich . . .
/> Up the low rise with the wall on the other side, I turn round and look back at the redoubt, at the last island of warmth in a cold world that's been sucked dry. I contemplate it for a minute or so. "Had a thought," I say aloud, and get a burst of static in return.
I look round. Chaitin is standing farther up the hillside; he waves at me. More static. "You there?" I ask, fiddling with my radio controls. "Can you hear me?"
He walks toward me, brandishing something. I focus on a coil of cable with a plug on the end, but as he approaches the static begins to clear up. He pokes it at my chest pack but I bat his hand away. "Speak," he says roughly.
I take a deep breath: "I need to make some measurements. There is something very, very wrong with this whole picture, you know? Why is it so cold? Why are our suit radios all malfunctioning? What killed everyone in that bunker? Seems to me that Alan needs to know. Hell! I need to know–it's important."
Through his suit helmet Chaitin's expression is unreadable. "Explain."
I shiver with a sudden realisation. "Look, they summoned something that hunkered down and sucked all the fucking energy out of this universe, and if Alan sets off an H-bomb–what do you think is going to happen?"
"Talk more." Chaitin offers me the cable again.
I point to my damaged chest pack, then point my finger straight up. "Look, the stars are all reddish, and they're too far apart. That's number one. Red shift means they're all flying away from each other like crazy! That, or the energy in the light they're emitting is being sapped by something. I figure that effect is also what's screwing with our radios: in this universe the Planck constant is changing. Number two, the sun–the sun's gone out. It went out a few decades ago, that's why the temperature's down to forty absolute and dropping; the only thing keeping the Earth above cosmic background temperature is the fact that it's a honking great reservoir of hot rocks, with enough thorium and uranium mixed in that decay heat will keep it simmering for billions of years. But that's losing energy faster than it should, too, because something here is distorting the laws of physics. Third: for all we know all the other suns have gone out, too–the light we see from the stars is fossil radiation, it's been travelling for years, centuries."
The Atrocity Archives Page 20
