The Atrocity Archives

by Charles Stross

  "Ah." Alan looks as if he's just swallowed something unpleasant. "So. It's your considered opinion that our best course of action would be to disable the bomb and retire, hmm?"

  "That's about the size of it," I agree. "Where did you plant the gadget anyway?"

  "Downstairs; but that's a bit of a sore point," Alan comments airily. "The bomb's armed and we've switched over from manual detonation control via the dead man's handle to the internal timer. But there's a catch. You see, Her Majesty's Government doesn't really like the idea of leaving armed hydrogen bombs lying around the place without proper supervision. PAL control is fine, and so is a detonation wire and dead man's handle, but these things are designed in case they might get overrun, and we wouldn't want to hand an H-bomb on a plate to some random troublemaker, what?"

  Alan begins to pace. Alan pacing, that's a bad sign. "Once we've inserted the initiator, dialled a yield, armed the detonators, punched in the permissive action codes, set the timer, then removed the control wires, nothing's going to stop it. Can't even open it up: someone messes with the tamper piece, it calls 'tilt' and the game's over. Y'see, we might be a Soviet Guards Motor Rifle formation that's just captured the bridge it's strapped to. Or a bunch of uglies from the backwoods behind the Khyber Pass. So, as you can understand, even conceding that letting it blow here and now might be a very bad idea, it's going to go. Unless you fancy trying your hand at dissecting a booby-trapped, ticking H-bomb, and I don't recall seeing UXB training on your resume."

  He glances at his watch. "Only another fifty-seven minutes to go, lad. We can probably make it to the gate if we leave in less than half an hour, as long as there aren't too many of the blighters left outside–so I'd hurry up if I was you."

  "Could we take it with us?" I ask.

  He barks a short laugh. "What, you think they'd thank us for dragging a live quarter-megaton bomb back into one of the most densely populated cities in Europe?"

  "They can't stop it then?"

  "Take an act of God to stop it now," Howe says with gloomy satisfaction. "Take an act of God to get us all out of here alive, too. Bet you're wishing you hadn't come back!"

  I lick my lips, but my tongue seems to have turned to dry leather. Leathery, like one of Brains's weirdly scrambled-in-its-own-shell eggs. Which reminds me: suddenly what I have to do comes crystal clear. "I think I know how to get your people out regardless of whether there are any revenants outside," I say. "Same way I got in here without anyone spotting me. As for the bomb–what if just a bit of the implosion charge goes off prematurely? Say, at one end of it?"

  Alan looks at me oddly. "How are you going to do that?"

  "Never mind. What happens if? If, if. Way I remember it, all nuclear weapons these days use a core of plutonium and a set of shaped charges that interlock around it. When they go off, they have to be really precisely timed or the core doesn't implode properly, and if it doesn't implode it doesn't reach critical mass, and if it doesn't go supercritical it doesn't go bang. Right?" I'm almost bouncing up and down. "There's some stuff I need just outside the airlock–a bag of severed hands, a basilisk gun. I've got the rest of the kit here. How many of us are there upstairs, roundabout, who need to walk out? The sack has enough samples cut from execution victims to make Hands of Glory for everyone–walk right past the lurkers in the forest. If someone goes and gets them right now. As for the bomb . . ."

  I'm still thinking about the bomb as Sergeant Howe wordlessly ducks into the airlock and I hear the hiss of depressurisation. Ticking, ticking. The bomb's booby-trapped. I need to figure out a way of reaching through the case, reaching past the wires and the polystyrene foam spacers around the plutonium rod, past the surrounding parcels of lithium deuteride wrapped in depleted uranium, through the steel casing of the A-bomb trigger–

  Alan is standing in front of me, leaning in my face. "Bob."

  "Yeah." The basilisk gun is the solution. I think . . .

  "Hand of Glory. Tell me what the hell I need to know."

  "A Hand of Glory is fabricated from the hand and wrist of someone who has been wrongly executed. A fairly simple circuit is inscribed around the radius and ulna and the fingertips are ignited. What it does is a limited invocation that results in the bearer becoming invisible. In effect. There are variations, like the inversion laser–stick a phase-conjugate mirror on the base and it makes a serious mess of whatever the hand's pointed at–but the original use of the hand is as a disintermediating tool for observer/subject interactions. Or so Eugene Wigner insisted. How many people have you got?"

  The airlock door is cycling: Alan crouches, gun levelled on the door. He waves me off to one side impatiently.

  It's Howe. No luminous worms behind his face plate; he hefts a lumpy, misshapen sack and my basilisk gun as he steps through the door.

  "Seven, plus yourself. You were saying?" Alan asks.

  "Give me." I take the sack. It's like peeling potatoes, I tell myself, just like peeling potatoes. "Anyone got a roll of duct tape? And a pen? Great, now clear the fuck away and give me room to breathe." Just like peeling potatoes, strange vegetables that grow in a soil of horror, watered with blood. A lot of the original bits of folklore surrounding the Hand of Glory are just that. You don't need a candle made of human fat, horse dung, and suchlike, with a wick made of the hair of a hanged man. You don't need fingers from the fetus of a hanged pregnant woman, amputated stealthily at midnight. All you need is a bunch of hands, some wire or solder, a pen, a digital-analogue converter, a couple of programs I carry on my palmtop, and a strong stomach. Well, I can fake the stomach: just tell myself I'm peeling spuds, sticking bits of wire in Mr. Potato Head, triggering ghost echoes in a decaying neural network, feeding something arcane. Howe pushes in and insists on copying what I do; it's annoying at first, but monkey-see monkey-do gets results and between us we make short work of the sack. A couple of the hands are washouts but in twenty minutes flat I've got a shrunken bag and a row of ghastly trophies arranged on the guardroom table.

  "Here," I say. Scary Spice–who has been shuffling nervously and keeping one eye on the airlock door–jumps.

  "What's up?"

  Howe watches with silent interest.

  I hold up a hand. "Look." Thank Cthulhu for pocket soldering irons: the fingertips ignite neatly, that crypt-glow dancing around them.

  Scary Spice looks confused. "Where are you? What's up?" His eyeballs are sliding around like greased marbles; he instinctively raises his gun.

  "Safe that!" snaps Howe. He winks in my general direction.

  "Hold out your left hand, Scary," I say.

  "Okay." He shuts his eyes; I shove the stump of the hand into his glove. "What the fuck is this?"

  I blink and try to focus on him, but he's slipping away. It's weird; I try to track him but my eyes refuse to lock on. "What you're holding is called a Hand of Glory. While you're holding it, nobody can see you–it works on the possessors outside, too, or I wouldn't be here."

  "Uh, yeah. How long's it good for?"

  "How the fuck should I know?" I reply. I glance at Howe.

  "Put it down now," he says. A hand appears on the table and I find I can focus on Scary again. Howe glances at me. "This is a bloody miracle," he says morosely. "Pity we didn't have it a couple of years ago in Azerbaijan." He keys his mike: "Howe to all, we've got a ticket home. Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, everyone downstairs now. Captain, you're going to want to see this too."

  * * * *

  It's like being at school again, sitting one fucking exam after another, sure that if you don't finish the question in the set time it's going to screw your life. This exam, the fail grade is anything short of 100 percent and you get the certificate, with no appeal possible, milliseconds after you put your pen down.

  I'm crouching in the basement with Alan and a thing that looks like a steel dustbin on a handcart, if steel dustbins came painted green and neatly labelled THIS WAY UP and DO NOT DROP. I will confess that I'm sweating like a pig, even in the frigid air of th
e redoubt, because we are now down to about fifteen minutes and if this fails we won't have time to reach the gate.

  "Take five," says Alan. "You're doing really well, Bob. I mean that. You're doing really well."

  "I bet you say that to all the boys," I mutter, turning the badly photocopied page of arming instructions–the pamphlet that comes with the bomb has a blue cardboard cover, like a school exercise book that's been classified top secret by mistake.

  "No, really." Alan leans back against the wall. "They got away, Bob. Everyone but us. Maybe you don't think that's a big deal, but they do; they'll remember it for the rest of their lives, and even if we don't follow them they'll be drinking a toast to your memory for a long time to come."

  "That's reassuring." I flip another page. I didn't know H-bombs came with user manuals and cutaway diagrams, exploded views of the initiator core. "Look, this is where the pit goes, right?" I point at the page and then at a spot about five centimetres above the base of the dustbin.

  "No." Alan moves my hand right up to the top of the bomb casing. "You've got it upside down."

  "Well, that's a relief," I say lightly.

  "At least, I think it's upside down," he says in a worried tone of voice.

  "Uh-huh." I move my finger over the diagram. "Now this is where the detonation controller goes, right?"

  "Yes, that's right," he says, much more reassuringly. I give the green dustbin a hard glance.

  Atom bombs aren't that complicated. Back in the late 1970s an American high school physics teacher got together with his class. They designed and built an A-bomb. The US Navy thanked them, trucked it away, added the necessary plutonium, and detonated it down on the test range. The hard bit about building an A-bomb is the plutonium, which takes a specialised nuclear reactor and a chemical reprocessing plant to manufacture and which tends to be kept behind high barbed-wire fences patrolled by guys with guns.

  However, atom bombs do have one interesting trait: they go "bang" when you squeeze a sphere of plutonium using precisely detonated explosive lenses. Conventional explosives. And if those lenses don't detonate in exactly the right sequence, if you scramble them, you may get a fizzle, but you don't get a firework. It's like an egg, with a yolk (the A-bomb detonator) and a white (the fusion spark plug and other bang-amplifying widgets) inside it.

  So here I am, sitting next to a rogue H-bomb with fourteen minutes to run on its clock; and when Alan passes me a magic marker I draw a big fat X on its casing, because I intend to do to this bomb exactly what Brains did to his eggs–scramble it without breaking the shell.

  "How many lenses in this model?"

  "Twenty. Dodecahedral layout, triangular sections. Each of 'em is a slab of RDX with a concave centre and a berylide-alloy facing pointing inward."

  "Gotcha." More chalk marks. RDX is mondo nasty high explosive; its detonation speed is measured in kilometres per second. When they blow, those explosive lenses will punch the beryllium-alloy sheet inward onto a suspended sphere of plutonium about the size of a large grapefruit or a small melon. If you blow them all within a microsecond or so, the shock wave closes around the metallic core like a giant fist, and squeezes. If they go off asymmetrically, instead of squeezing the plutonium until it goes bang, they squirt it harmlessly out the side. Well, harmlessly unless you're standing nearby. A slug of white-hot supercritical plutonium barreling out of a ruptured bomb casing at several hundred metres per second is not exactly fun for all the family. "That puts the top half of the hemisphere about–here."

  "Very good. What now?"

  "Fetch a chair and some books or boxes or something." I pick up the basilisk gun and begin fiddling with it. "I need to align this on the hemisphere and tape it in position."

  When the beryllium-alloy sphere assembles it squishes the plutonium pit inward. Plutonium is about twice as dense as lead, and fairly soft; it's a metal, warm to the touch from alpha particle decay, and it exhibits some of the weirdest heavy-metal chemistry known to science. It exists in half a dozen crystalline forms between zero and one hundred Celsius; what it gets up to inside an imploding nuclear core is anybody's guess.

  "Chair."

  "Duct tape."

  "What next?"

  "Get me a cordless drill, a half-inch bit, and a pair of scissors."

  At the core of the grapefruit there's a hollow space, and inside the hollow there's a pea-sized lump of weirdly shaped metal alloy, the design of which is a closely guarded secret. When the molten-hot compressed plutonium hits it, it vomits neutrons. And the neutrons in turn start a cascade reaction inside the plutonium; every time a plutonium nucleus is hit by a neutron it wobbles like jelly, splits in two, and emits a bunch more neutrons and a blast of gamma radiation. This happens in a unit of time called a "shake"–about a tenth of a thousandth of a millionth of a second–and every plutonium nucleus in the core will have been blasted into fragments within fifty shakes of the core shockwave hitting the initiator and triggering that initial neutron burst. (If it collapses symmetrically.) And maybe a few milliseconds later the devil will be free to dance in our universe.

  Twelve minutes to go. I position the chair in front of the bomb. The back of the chair is made of plywood–a real win–so I drill holes in it at the right separation, then get Alan to hold the basilisk box while I chop strips of duct tape off the reel and bind it to the chair immediately in front of the X where I think the explosive lenses lie.

  "Bingo." One chair. One basilisk gun–a box with a camcorder to either side–taped to the back of the chair. One ticking hydrogen bomb. The back of my neck itches, as if already feeling the flash of X-rays ripped from the bleeding plasma of the bomb's casing when the pit disassembles in a few scant shakes of Teller's alarm clock. "I'm powering up the gun now." The gun's sensors face the bomb through the holes I've drilled in the chair's back. I switch it on and watch the charge indicator. Damn, the cold doesn't seem to have done the batteries any good. It's still live, but close to the red RECHARGE zone.

  "Okay," I say, leaning back. "One more thing to do: we have to trip the observe button."

  "Yes, that seems obvious," says Alan. "Um, mind me asking why?"

  "Not at all." I close my eyes, feeling as if I've just run a marathon. "The basilisk spontaneously causes about 1 percent of the carbon nuclei in the target in front of it to tunnel into silicon. With one hell of an energy release at the same time, of course."

  "But plutonium isn't carbon–"

  "No, but the explosive lenses are made of RDX, which is a polynitrated aromatic hydrocarbon compound. You turn 1 percent of the RDX charge into silicon and it will go bang very enthusiastically indeed. If we offset it to one side like this"–I nudge the chair a couple of centimeters–"one side of the A-bomb's explosive lenses predetonate, totally out of sequence, causing a fizzle. Imagine a giant's fist, squeezing the plutonium core; now imagine he's left his thumb off the top. Molten plutonium squirts out instead of compressing around the initiator and going bang. You get a messy neutron pulse but no supercriticality excursion. Maybe explosive disassembly of the case, and a mess of radiation, but no mushroom cloud."

  Alan glances at his watch. "Nine minutes. You'd better be going."

  "Nine–what do you mean?"

  He looks at me tiredly. "Laddie, unless there's a timer on this basilisk gadget, someone has to stay here and pull the trigger. You're a civilian, but I signed up for the Queen's shilling."

  "Bullshit!" I glare at him. "You've got a wife and kids. If anyone's disposable around here it's me."

  "Firstly, I seem to remember you saying you'd do whatever I said before you came along on this road trip. Secondly, you understand what's going on: you're too bloody important to leave behind. And thirdly, it's my job," he says heavily. "I'm a soldier. I'm paid to catch bullets, or neutrons. You're not. So unless you've got some kind of magic remote controller for–"

  I blink rapidly. "Let me look at it again," I say.

  The basilisk gun is a bunch of customised IC circuits bolted
to a pair of digital camcorders. I lean closer. The good news is they have fast interfaces. The bad news–

  Shit. No infrared. The TV remote control program on my palmtop won't work. I straighten up. "No," I say.

  "Get the hell out of here then," says Alan. "You've got six minutes. I'm going to wait sixty seconds after you leave the room, then hit the button." He sounds very calm. "Go on, now. Unless you think losing two lives is better than losing one."

  Shit. I punch the door frame twice, oblivious to the pain in my wrist.