Charles Stross - The Atrocity Archives

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 photograph 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."

He's on the phone again. "Very good, any survivors? Two, you say, and three sacrifices? That's excellent. Have you identified-"

I tap him on the shoulder. "Mo told me what she was researching on the Black Chamber contract," I say. "You really don't want them to get their hands on it."

Angleton's head whips round. "One minute, boy." Back to the phone: "Get them to sing. I don't care how you do it; by dawn I want to know who they thought they were summoning." He puts the phone down and glares at me. "Tell me."

"Probability manipulation," I say.

"Close, but not close enough," Angleton says coldly. He stands up, leaving the armless chair swinging-in the confined space of the truck this is not a good idea. "You got some of it right and the rest wrong. And what makes you think I can afford to risk you? This is an OCCULUS job now: straight in, find out what's there, plant demolition charges, straight out."

"Demolition charges." I look past his shoulder. The door opens and a familiar face is coming in. Odd, I'd never imagined what Derek the Accountant would look like in battle dress. (Worried, mostly.)

"The commander's due in half an hour," Derek says by way of introduction. "What's the goat doing here?"

"Enough." Angleton waves me to follow as he heads for the door. I slide my feet into moon boots, follow him without bothering to fasten the straps. I hurry down the steps into a flashing hell of red and blue lights; Dutch police escorting sleepy hotel guests and residents to safety, firemen gearing up with breathing apparatus in the road. Angleton pulls me aside. "Interrupt if you see Captain Barnes-"

"Who?"

"Alan Barnes," he says impatiently. "Listen." He fixes me with a beady stare: "This is not a game. There's a very good chance that Dr. O'Brien is already dead-in case you hadn't noticed, there's no air on the other side of that gate, and unless her abductors wanted her alive they won't have bothered with niceties like a respirator for her. That lack of air is one of the reasons we must close it as fast as possible, the other being to stop the people who opened it from making use of it as a stable egress portal."

"You say people ," I mutter. "Who? The Ahnenerbe-SS?"

"I hope so," he replies grimly. "Anything else would be infinitely worse. At the end of the war, Himmler ordered a number of so-called werewolf units to continue the struggle. We've never been able to track down the Ahnenerbe's final redoubt, but the suspicion that it lies on the other side of a gate goes back a long way-you've read OGRE REALITY, you can imagine why the Mukhabarat might want to get in touch with them."

"So the other side of that gate is"-my mind races-"a holdout from the Third Reich, a colony intended to keep the dark flame burning and exact revenge on the enemies of Nazism in due course… One that's had fifty years to fester and grow on an alien world… But they lost the coordinates for the return journey, didn't they? Something went wrong and they were trapped there until-" I stop and stare at Angleton. "You hope that's what's on the other side of the gate?"

He nods. "The alternatives are all much worse."

On further thought I have to admit he's right: a colony of leftover Nazi necromancers and their SS bodyguards are trivially dangerous compared to things like the one that took over Fred the Accountant. And they are small beer by the standards of the sea of universes, where malignant intelligences wait only for an invitation to surge through a knothole in the platonic realm and infect our minds.

"How are you going to deal with them?" I ask. Angleton leads me around the truck; I can get a good view of the big low-loader that squeezed past us, and there's some sort of tracked vehicle sitting on its load bed. There's a crane, too. I peer closer, but the cordon of cops around it bars my view. "How the hell are you going to get that through a third-floor window?" I ask.

Angleton shrugs. "I'm sure the hotel owners will file a claim on their building insurance." He looks at me. "Alan's men are professionals, Robert. They're not used to being slowed down by civilians like you-or me. What can you do that they can't?"

I lick my lips. "Can they open a temporary gate back home if the door there slams shut behind them? Can they safely disarm a live geometry node?"

"They're the Artists' Rifles," Angleton says witheringly. "They're the bloody SAS, boy, 21st Battalion Territorial Army; what did you think they were, a gun club? Who else do you think we'd trust with a hydrogen bomb wired up to a dead man's handle?"

I stare at the low-loader and realise that the cops around it are all carrying HK-4s and facing outward. "I can provide you with a different kind of insurance policy. Give me the charts and I'll see they make it back alive-with Mo, if I have any say in the matter. Plus, aren't you just a little curious about what the Ahnenerbe might have been doing with a Z-2 and its descendants for the past fifty years?"