PHANGs are, of necessity, a scarce resource. We’re limited by population density. Each of us needs to consume a minimum of one other human being’s life every six months—more if we’re actively practicing ritual magic. I’m barely a beginner. Some of my people are well on their way to becoming formidable practitioners (like Alex, but best not to tell the little oik that). However, beyond a certain level, sorcerers with V syndrome need to feed more and more lives to their parasites to keep them in check. An alfär battle-mage is the necromantic equivalent of an artillery company, but to function offensively they need to consume a human sacrifice every hour, minimum.1 PHANGs in New York, working with the NYPD, imply a growing pile of corpses somewhere, tacitly condoned by the NYPD at a policy level, which goes way beyond even the usual trigger-happiness we Brits attribute to American cops. PHANGs—hunting supervillains aside—are not an appropriate tool for law enforcement, any more than you’d fire cruise missiles at shoplifters.
“I agree,” Jim murmurs. “But I’m exhausted, you’re tired, and they’ll still be here tomorrow. Let’s go to bed.” I nod and, leaning on him, we head back to our hotel room.
* * *
Two weeks earlier, a couple of days after Derek and my visit to Camp Tolkien …
A couple of days after the session at Camp Tolkien, I am required to make another field trip to inspect an agency asset who Derek and Colonel Lockhart insist will come in handy during the terminal stages of Operation YELLOW OLYMPIC. As the asset is nominally owned by the Royal Air Force, we’re to be given a proper Ministry of Defense dog-and-pony show—which means suits and briefcases all round. Five of us are in attendance: me, the colonel, Brains (in his capacity as speaker-to-techies), Jim (who I already know is going to be along for the ride), and Jonquil, who thinks she’s here to report back to Mumsie, but is actually here so I can keep an eye on her.
It’s two and a half hours by train from Paddington to Bristol Temple Meads, but the installation we’re visiting is housed in a hangar by the Airbus plant at Filton Airport, some distance out of town. So we set off bright and early from London City Airport aboard an elderly BAe 146 airliner from 32 Squadron RAF, the Queen’s Flight. Less than half an hour later we’re on the ground again, and I can release my death-grip on the armrests and breathe a sigh of relief as we taxi straight to the hangar where they keep the white elephants.
It’s an unpleasantly sunny day. Jim has thoughtfully brought a gigantic black parasol, which he holds over my head as I slither down the air stairs and scuttle towards the human-sized door in the hangar. Jonquil seems to think it’s all a bit of a lark and strolls nonchalantly along, whistling tunelessly. Brains is gawping in all directions, head spinning like a radar scanner. I dodge around Jonquil with a glare—which she misses completely, probably because I’m wearing a veil again—and Lockhart, breathing heavily, makes it to the door and stops in front of me just before I slam right through it. “Wait,” he grates, fixing me with a glare.
“If I wait I’ll burn,” I warn him, glaring right back. I can feel the sun through my parasol, clothing, and sunblock. I swear the hair on the back of my neck is beginning to smoke.
“No, really,” he says, and waves his warrant card at the door. “It’s warded and there are armed guards.” He raises his voice: “Gerald Lockhart, SOE ops, here to see Squadron Leader Bradshaw, VIP party of five. We’re expected.”
The door opens onto blessed twilight. “Go inside, have your ID ready,” Gerry murmurs. Once inside I flip back my veil and then pull out my own warrant card, blinking as my eyes adjust to the huge, unlit indoor space. I can hear feeders chittering, somewhere nearby.
“Identify yourself,” grates a metallic voice. It sounds like a Dalek with laryngitis. I startle as someone looms over me, the source of both the challenge and the feeders: brainless crawling manifestations of extradimensional hunger. If bound to flesh they can animate it for a while and use it to infect living people by touch. (Not PHANGs like me, though—we’re immune.) In this case, the animated corpse is so thoroughly dead that it’s almost entirely skeletonized. It stands upright, bones screwed into a trellis of metal struts, motors, and pistons that whine faintly whenever it shifts its balance. It smells of dry rot and burning insulation. Green luminous worm-shapes are writhing in its eye sockets: “Identify yourself!” a tinny recorded loop screeches from a concealed speaker. “Identify yourself!”
A blackout curtain hanging from the ceiling about four meters inside the doorway blocks my view of the hangar. To either side I see other silver-gray exoskeletons turn and lurch into motion, converging on us, their bony cargo bobbing and grinning inside them like so many gibbeted cyborgs. Some of them carry guns. I will admit to being a little bit creeped out by them. I bare my fangs as I hold up my warrant card: “Baroness Karnstein, from Whitehall,” I say as calmly as possible. “I’m expected.”
“Baron-ess…” The skeleton freezes in position for a second, then takes two jerky steps backward and, improbably, comes to attention. “All glory to the All-Highest!” it screeches.
“All glory,” I echo, with a sidelong glance at the other two constructs as they lurch hastily into position alongside the first, and salute.
Then Brains steps over the threshold. His eyes widen. “Ooh!” he says excitedly. “I’ve read about these!”
“Intruder! Identify! Identify!” screeches the necrotic chorus line, guns swinging to bear.
“Stand down, Harry!” shouts a baritone voice from behind the far side of the curtain. “I say, stand down! Sorry about the reception party, ma’am, we weren’t expecting your flight to arrive for another half hour or so and Harry gets excited about intruders…”
“So I see. Is it safe for the rest of my party to enter?”
“Nearly! Harry one through four, code whisky tango foxtrot, return to maintenance station immediately.” The animated skeletons turn and, with a squeal of under-lubricated joints, march jerkily towards the far side of the curtained-off space. “I’m sorry, ma’am,” says the voice from behind the curtain, “but if you can just give them a minute to shut down, I’ll get you signed in so that we can proceed.”
The curtain directly in front of me billows slightly, and a tall, well-built fellow with sandy hair and an improbably strong jaw steps out. He may not be expecting us just yet, but he’s taken pains over his dress uniform this morning, clearly anticipating an inspection. “You must be Squadron Leader Bradshaw?”
“Yes, ma’am. If I can see your ID? Excellent. The rest of your team can enter now. I’ll need to check them off individually. Here, I have security tags for you. Please remember to wear these at all times, otherwise Harry will get quite irate…”
The badge on the lanyard he hands me is heavily warded: my fingertips prickle on contact.
“Colonel Lockhart, sir!” Bradshaw draws himself up. Lockhart nods minutely. “Welcome back to Triple-six Squadron.”
“It’s a pleasure to visit again,” Gerry Lockhart drawls. “Ready for the show?”
“Absolutely!” Bradshaw checks Jonquil and Brains in, then holds the heavy curtain open for us. “Welcome to the squadron.”
I follow Gerry past the blackout drape and finally get a glimpse of the hidden magic, a secret deadly enough that they feel the need to deploy Harryhausen bots to guard it. I forget to breathe for a few seconds as I stare up at the underside of a pointy white nose cone eight meters above my head. After a few moments I notice it’s flanked by two companions, each lined up on the centerline of the hangar doors like Godzilla’s own throwing knives. They’re parked amidst a clutter of maintenance carts, air stairs, ground tugs, and other support equipment. People in coveralls are working on two of them, and a fourth aircraft without wings or nose is parked against the far wall of the hangar. The lights are on in the cockpit of the plane looming over me, the heads of a maintenance crewmember just visible in the flight deck side window.
I feel like I just walked into the central atrium of a museum and, instead of a skeleton on a sta
nd, have found a live tyrannosaur staring at me as it sizes me up for a snack.
“Triple-six is traditionally a reconnaissance squadron,” Bradshaw explains. “The number used to be assigned to the Royal Canadian Air Force. It was also allocated to a British Army scout helicopter squadron in the seventies, before being publicly deactivated. That’s when we took it over.” He smiles faintly. “We used to fly recon missions for you people—the kind everything else is too low, slow, or small for.”
“But. But.” I stare up at the impossible aircraft above me. The first thought that pops into my mind pops out of my mouth: “This has got to be a gigantic hole in someone else’s budget…”
“Not that big, but plenty big enough,” Bradshaw says ruefully. “The mid-eighties block two refit—that gave us—” he descends into an acronym soup of FADEC and in-flight refueling—“was responsible for the AEW cost overruns that broke GEC-Marconi. More recently, we got into a whole heap of trouble after 2010 because we siphoned so much money from the Nimrod MRA4 modernization program that it got cancelled out from under us. And of course Concorde going out of civilian service didn’t help, either. But it’s only the third most expensive black project in postwar British history that I know of.”
I shut my mouth. Third most expensive? I don’t want to know. Off to one side, Gerry Lockhart is watching me with crossed arms and a stupendously smug expression.
“Let’s continue this in the site management office, where I can give you a full briefing on what our white elephants can do…”
* * *
The next morning finds Janice, armed with a multitool and a bundle of cable ties, weaving a web of spell servers in the living room of a safe house in the suburbs of DC that Derek found on Airbnb.
Janice and Derek are the tech support half of Team Three, the DC crew. They flew into Reagan International the evening before under separate covers. Janice is not terribly happy about this. Like other PHANGs, she’s intensely itchy about going out in daylight. As a Myers-Briggs INTP personality type, she gets anxious about situations she can’t control and predict minutely. She’s just about got a handle on the portly middle-aged bloke with the pebble glasses and M&S cardigans who she’s been assigned to shadow, but trying to cope with Derek (who is even more Aspie than she is) and foreign accents and road signs and everything else simultaneously is taking her close to overload. The lights on her personal control panel would be amber and flashing into red, well out of her comfort zone, if not for the fact that the house is … well, it’s huge and comfortably furnished, there are blackout curtains on all the windows, and there is a stack of boxes waiting for her in the garage (which she can get into through a side entrance without going outdoors).
“Janice?” Derek calls from the open archway that leads to the dining area.
Janice ignores him as she continues to lay out the edges of a very strange graph—the five-dimensional structure of which the Elder Sign is merely a flattened projection into two dimensions—in ethernet cables. A box of Raspberry Pi computing boards and a twenty-four-socket USB power supply sit close at hand, ready to bring the compute nodes of her project to life.
“Janice, I need to go—”
“Derek!” Janice finally snaps. She places the cable she’s holding precisely where it belongs, then straightens up and glares at him. “What?”
Derek wilts slightly in the face of her hostility. “There’s no need for that.”
“I was”—she looks back at the cable maze—“concentrating.”
“Sorry.” His posture screams not sorry. “I need to go out. The Library of Congress is open to researchers and it looks like if I get there before 4 p.m. today I can apply for a reader identification card—”
“Library of Congress. Right.” Janice regards him through half-closed eyes, then relaxes slightly. “You know I can’t come with you.”
“I know.” Derek gathers his shredded dignitas around him like a slightly baggy sports jacket. “But Forecasting Ops suggested it, and I’m here now—”
“So what are you waiting for?” Janice blinks, blindsided. “It’s not like you’re going to be much help with this.” Her shoulder roll encompasses the boxes scattered all over the floor. “Go on, shoo. On second thoughts, buy me a crate of Diet Coke? I’m going to be up all night getting this grid up.” She tosses him the keys to the rental SUV parked outside the garage.
Derek looks momentarily shame-faced. “But I can’t drive.”
Janice glares at him. “What do you expect me to do about that? It’s daylight! Expense an Uber.”
“An—” His eyes cross.
She walks across the room and leans over him—or seems to: Derek, despite shrinking, is a good fifteen centimeters taller than Janice. “You’ve got your phone, yes? Is it charged? Yes? Good. Let me show you how we get a ride in the twenty-first century.”
Working with Derek is frequently infuriating.
He’s terrifyingly bright in some ways but through no fault of his own he spent forty years in a Laundry-run internment camp for cultists, where paper was rationed and any technology more sophisticated than a manual typewriter was forbidden. Personal computers and the internet passed him by completely until he was released a couple of years ago, and he’s still reluctant to use the smartphone Facilities issued him, which is why they paired him with Janice. Meanwhile, she can’t go out in daylight without burning, so they gave her Derek to carry her fire extinguisher. They work together like they’re running a three-legged race—while drunk.
Having bookmarked the safe-house address in Derek’s Uber app, Janice is about to return to her network layout when Derek asks, “By the way, what is that you’re working on?”
“Software-configurable RAID grid.” She pauses, a cable in each hand. “Go on, your ride will be waiting.”
“RAID grid being…?”
“Redundant Array of Interconnected Demons.” She bares her teeth at him.
“Demons!” he squeaks, and clutches his magic dice.
“The alfär coughed up this topology. It’s an anchor for Phase Three that can be reconfigured as a storage ward or a summoning grid. Now go on, piss off to your library. Take your time. I’ll be fine here.” As he vanishes round the corner in the direction of the front door she raises her voice: “Don’t forget the Diet Coke!”
* * *
One of the first things I did when the PM gave me my current job was to establish a Working Group on Best Practices for conducting overseas operations. One of the rules we settled on was that PHANGs should always be partnered with a Renfield—a human co-worker, able to go out in daylight and take care of the little chores that don’t come easily to us bloodsucking fiends. This is why I’m travelling with Jim, and why Janice is paired with Derek, and Yarisol is with … I’ll get round to her later. It’s a generalization of the rule of thumb that you never send one agent to do a critical job on their own—the risk of them being run over by a cycle courier while crossing the street may be low, but you don’t want to bet your operation on it. So you always send at least two bodies, which is why Pete and Brains are driving across the Great Plains together.
A second rule is to keep chains of command from crossing international borders whenever possible. It’s vastly easier for a hostile signals intelligence group to detect long-range communications than a local network, especially if the locals coordinate face-to-face wherever possible rather than helpfully emailing each other their secret plans. Which is the primary reason Derek is in DC—he’s handling physical logistics for our mobile teams, a glorified Amazon shopping spree. He’s got another task as well, of course, but that’s a one-off, while the logistics are ongoing. Meanwhile Janice is there to take care of more recondite support activities, like provisioning the DC safe house with secure wards and a veritable zoo of summonings, in case things go wrong and we need to cover an emergency evacuation.
As for the evacuation, we have a plan for that.
Our operational null hypothesis is that the PM is wrong abo
ut everything. There is nothing sinister happening in America. No fountainhead of near-mystical executive power embodying the hopes and fears of a third of a billion Americans has gone missing, nothing to see here, move along now. Everybody forgetting the Executive Branch is just a laughable misunderstanding, a glitch in the news cycle, or something. If this is the case we can close up shop, everybody breathes a sigh of relief and checks in for their flight home, and that’s the end of it.
Chances of this happening? Oh, come on …
Now consider the worst possible case: that Cthulhu Himself has awakened, the Nazgûl are liquidating the presidency—the office, not just the man—as some kind of sacrifice, and we have to get out of Dodge fast. If we don’t get across the border and out of shooting range, or otherwise fuck their plans up, the Black Chamber come after us with the US Air Force, the Army, the National Guard, Border Patrol, every local police force this side of Canada, and several thousand demons.
Chances of this happening? Oh, come on (again).
Most likely the truth lies somewhere in between. Or maybe the PM has palmed a couple of cards and doesn’t trust me with the full picture just yet, but is actually maneuvering everything into a favorable position before he lays a smackdown on his rivals.
Either way, though, the business with everybody forgetting the President? And the PM telling me to work out how to rescue him? That’s a hard problem. So it’s a good thing I have the PM’s signature on an unlimited black budget—and permission to use some very exotic tools.
* * *
A final flashback (I promise!): one week before the present:
Yarisol’mün is uneasy.
She sits in the back seat of a snarling metal and plastic box that sways and rattles as it hurls itself along a wide urük trail, screaming past other grubby metal boxes with a warble of sirens and a hypnotic flare of blue and red lights from a casing atop its roof. She’s swathed in the daylight veil and robes of a mage, but not bound. Two urük males in dark blue uniforms with silver badges sit up front, one of them working the lever and wheel that direct the slave-cart’s chained burning energy. She can feel their heartbeats pulsing, warm and sticky and full of life—but All-Highest has decreed that she may not feed at will. Consequently she aches with the life-hunger, for the urük are miserly with the blood of their slave-farms. Outside her box on wheels other minds flash past, carried by their own urük-carts. Along the edge of the track she sees buildings, the squat baked-mud huts of the round-eared ape-men who captured and defeated the Host without granting them the honorable release of a victory sacrifice.
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