Charles Stross - Halting State

Backup generator? “The chief’s about sixty seconds away from sending in S Division,” you tell her. “He telled me to be your runner.”

“I see.” The Man in Black stops puking long enough to groan and sit back, leaning against a pillar. Liz thinks for a moment: “Tell the chief it’s all under control, but we hit electronic countermeasures. So far all we’ve got is lights on and nobody home, but if S Div come in shooting, it’s going to go blue on blue.”

“Electronic countermeasures.” You look around in disbelief. “Is that all this is?”

“No,” she says tightly, “but we’ll have it off-line in a couple of minutes. Go!”

You’ll say this for Verity, the old fart doesn’t believe in stomping on his subordinates’ chilblains. “Tell Kavanaugh she’s got fifteen minutes, or until she calls for backup.” You high-tail it back to the room of servers and pass the word on.

“Good. Mario, are you feeling better yet?” Mario, now sitting with his back to the pillar and the bin within arm’s reach, nods wearily. His glasses lie on the floor nearby, lighting the carpet up with a jagged lightning show.

“I will be alright.” He doesn’t sound it. “The others will…” He stops talking and takes a couple of deep breaths. “They’re upstairs now, except Hilda and Franz. They are looking for the generator.”

It’s almost as if someone is listening to him: There’s a tremendous double bang that shakes the floor, followed by the moan of a thousand fans whirring down into silence.

You can’t stop yourself. “It sounds like they found it,” you say, and—despite yourself—giggle. After a moment, you realize Mario and Liz are both staring at you as if you’ve grown a second head. So you stop.

“Let’s go and find Kemal,” says Liz. “What are these things, anyway?”

“Multi-core blade servers,” Mario pushes himself laboriously to his feet. “Each rack houses two hundred and fifty-six blades, each blade has that many processor cores—and each core is a thousand times as powerful as your phone. We are standing inside a million euros’ worth of mainframe.” He shuffles towards the interior of the data centre, back bowed like an old man. “This is an odd place to put a data centre, yes?”

You look at Liz: Liz looks back at you and shrugs. You mouth “ICE” at her, and she just twitches. “Who owns them? Where are they from?” she asks.

“That is an interesting question.” And one that Mario, who is rapidly recovering his composure, does not appear to want to answer. You peer at one of the glass doors, shining your torch through: The panel inside is labelled LENOVO.

He heads towards the other end of the server room, and Liz follows him closely. You stick behind her, logging everything (you hope). At the other end of the room there’s a set of fire doors and a stairwell leading up—as well as another pair of fire doors with some kind of blinking fire-alarm and gas sensor mounted next to them, and Kemal himself clattering down the stairs towards you. “Not in there!” he calls.

“Why not?” asks Liz, peering at the blinkenlights by the door.

“It might not be safe.” Kemal’s eyes look hollow without the goggles. You shine your torch on the panel; it seems to be saying there’s no problem.

“Right,” she says with heavy irony. “I see.” She pushes the door open before Kemal or Mario can stop her. “What is this?”

It’s another server room, but a lot smaller than the last one, and there’s a Frankenstein machine squatting in the middle of it all, like a cheap horror prop. There are cylinders of compressed gas and lots of narrow pipes and valves, all converging on something that looks like the stainless steel thermos flask from hell, sitting under an industrial-grade cooker hood with a gigantic duct vanishing into the ceiling. There’s another rack of boxes with blinkenlights sitting next to it, flashing and winking—evidently they’re on a separate power supply. And it’s steaming , a trickle of chilly smoky vapour wreathing its neck. “Hey, is this dangerous?” you ask.

“Stay away from it, Sergeant!” Kemal insists sharply. “It might be explosive.”

That’s a thought, but you’ve heard enough bullshit already that you’re not about to take his word for it. What kind of bampot builds a bomb with dry ice special effects and blinking LEDs, anyway? You unhook your cams and walk around it slowly, panning up and down to capture the lot.

“Wait!” Kemal hisses. “Don’t get too close.” He steps towards you. At the same moment, you feel an odd tugging. It’s almost as if your cam has acquired a life of its own. Startled, you pull back, then glance at the thermos flask. You’re two metres away from it. You can feel the chilly vapour on your skin: You try not to inhale as you sweep the camera across the scene, then take a step back.

“Is it dangerous ?” Liz demands, “Because if so, we’ve got to evacuate—”

“It’s another server,” Kemal says carefully, “but not a kind you can buy in a shop. In fact, what it’s doing here…” He trails off. “The power’s down,” he remarks quietly. “The refrigerator fans are quiet.”

“How long until it reaches its critical temperature?” asks Mario, right behind him.

Kemal nearly jumps. “We can’t risk that! We need it intact.”

“Tell me what’s going on,” Liz insists.

Kemal grunts, a sound like an irritated pig. “This whole installation shouldn’t exist. You don’t just drop data centres in the middle of suburbs; you’d need to get the power company to run extra cables in from the substation. There are enough processor blades in the next room to listen in on every Internet packet and voice call in Scotland; we think”—he points at the steaming Frankenstein machine—“this is probably the refrigeration vessel for a quantum processor—”

A door slams in the next room. You hear raised voices. Angry voices, and footsteps coming closer. Liz gestures you to one side of the door, and you quietly pull your can of whoop-ass. She nods minutely and takes a step back.

“—don’t care! You shouldn’t be here!”

“—idiots had checked with eurocontrol first—”

The doors bang open. Liz is already standing to one side, and she’s drawn her warrant card.

Standing in the doorway is one of Kemal’s henchmen, caught in vituperative argumentation with a familiar figure—Barry Michaels, CTO of Hayek Associates—and someone else behind him, middle-aged and red-faced. Barry’s hair is even more fly-away than it was when you turned up in his boardroom last Thursday, and he’s the one who’s doing most of the shouting. Henchman Number One, for his part, has lost his Man in Black poise. Possibly this is something to do with the way Barry—who, you notice, not only looks like an old public-school boy but is built like an old public-school rugby squad quarterback—has got him by the scruff of his immaculate suit jacket and is almost frog-marching him—

“Stop right there,” Liz says firmly. “You’re under arrest.”

You step sideways, keeping them both covered with your pepper spray.

Barry snorts, disgustedly. “No I’m not. Chief Constable?”

You look past him, at the man in the hounds-tooth check trousers and scary canary-yellow cardigan, with the golfing shoes and the somehow familiar face. So does Liz.

“Oh shit,” she says faintly.

“You can say that again. If you like,” says Deputy Chief Constable McMullen, who right this moment is looking distinctly peevish about been pulled away from the golf course on his day off. “Inspector, I’m here to tell you to do whatever this man tells you to do. Do you understand?”