Charles Stross - The Atrocity Archives

"Do you want me to strangle him now, or wait till he's finished annoying you?" asks Alan, who has sneaked up behind me so quietly I never even noticed. Needless to say I almost jump out of my skin.

"Leave him be." Angleton almost looks amused. "He's still young enough to think he's immortal-and he's cleared for active. All waivers signed, next of kin on file, carries an organ donor card, that sort of thing. Can you use him?"

I have to turn my head to keep both of them in view: Angleton, the old, dried-up ghost of intelligence spooks past, and Alan-Captain Barnes, that is-schoolmasterly and intense. "That depends," Alan tells Angleton. Then he focuses on me. "Bob, you can come along on this trip on one condition. The condition is that if you get any of my men killed by arsing around, I will personally shoot you. Do you understand and agree?"

Somehow I manage to nod, although my mouth's gone very dry all of a sudden. "Yup, got it. No arsing around."

"Well, that's all right then!" He claps his hands together briskly, then softens very slightly. "As long as you do what you're told, you'll pass. I'm going to give you to Blevins and Pike; they'll look after you. I know what your specialities are: weird alien runes, ancient Nazi computers, esoteric rocket science, that sort of thing. Boffin city. If we run into anything like that I'll let you know. What's your weapons clearance, if any?"

"I'm certified to level two, unconventional." I frown. "What else do you need?"

"Ever used scuba gear?"

"Er, yes." I neglect to add that it was on a holiday package deal, an afternoon of training followed by supervised swimming near a coral reef, with instructors and guides on hand.

"Okay, then I'll leave Pike to check you out on the vacuum gear. You'll be issued with a weapon; you are not, repeat not, to use it under any circumstances while any soldiers are left alive unless you are explicitly ordered to. Got that?"

"Find Pike. Learn how to use vacuum gear. Do not use weapon without orders."

"That'll do." Alan glances at Angleton. "He'll make a good Norwegian Blue, don't you think?"

Angleton raises an eyebrow. "Bet you he'll be 'pining for the fjords' within hours."

"Hah! Hah!" Alan doesn't bray: his laughter is oddly fractured, as if it's escaping from a broken muffler. Loss of control, that's what it is. He's thin, wiry, intense, and looks like the kind of schoolmaster who's spent years slitting throats in strange countries, and took to teaching as a way of passing on his knowledge. A weird breed, not uncommon in the British public schools, who recycle their own graduate cannon fodder to train the next generation in an ethos of military service. And whose mannerisms are aped lower down the academic ladder. Artists' Rifles indeed!

I TRY TELLING MYSELF THAT MO WILL BE ALL right, that they wouldn't have bothered abducting her if they didn't want her alive, but it's no good: whenever I get some idle time my brain keeps looping on the fact that someone I feel strongly about has been snatched and may already be dead. Luckily I don't have much time to obsess because Alan immediately drags me back inside the OCCULUS control truck and throws me to Sergeant Martin Pike, who takes one look at me, mutters something about the blessings of Loki, and starts grilling me about nitrogen narcosis, the bends, partial pressure of oxygen, and all sorts of other annoying things I haven't studied since school. Pike is a sergeant. He's also a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering and designs things that go fast and explode, when he isn't being a weekend soldier in a special unit hung off the SAS. He's met people like me before and knows how to deal with them.

A second-and then a third-fire-control truck has drawn up outside the evacuated hotel and we're in the back of vehicle number two, which seems to be a mobile armoury. I'm stripping off the survival gear and struggling into something like a bastard cross between a body stocking and a piece of bondage rubberwear from hell-low pressure survival gear, Pike tells me-a lycra and silk contraption that seems to consist mostly of straps and is designed to do the same job as a space suit in terms of holding me together and helping me breathe.

"Vacuum isn't as hostile as you probably imagine if you've read too much bad science fiction," he says while I'm grunting and wheezing over the upper half of the suit. "But you'd have real fun breathing without a decent gas seal around your regulator, and without this suit and pressurized goggles you'll end up half-blind and covered in blood blisters within ten or twenty minutes. The real problems are heat dissipation-there's no air around you to keep you cool by convection and insulated from the ground, which is going to be fucking cold-and maintaining your breathing. Cooling we can deal with-this cloth is porous, you start sweating and the sweat will evaporate and keep you cool, and there's a drinking bottle in your helmet. Don't let it run dry, because running one of these suits is a bit like running a noddy suit in the Iraqi desert-you will sweat like hell, you will drink a pint of water and electrolytes every hour, and if you forget to do that you will keel over from heat stroke. Turn round, now." I turn round and he starts tightening straps all the way up my back as if I'm wearing a corset. "These are to keep your rib cage under a bit of elastic tension, help you breathe out."

"What if I need to take a piss?" I ask.

He chuckles. "Go ahead. There's enough adsorbent padding that you probably won't freeze your wedding tackle off."

Trussed up in the pressure suit, I feel like a fifties comic-book hero who's blundered through a fetish movie's wardrobe. Pike passes me a bunch of elbow and knee protectors, a tough overall, and a pair of massively padded moon boots. Somehow I struggle into them. Then he comes up with a lightweight backpack frame with air tanks and-"A rebreather? Isn't that dangerous?" I ask.

"Yup. We aren't NASA and we can't waste five hours depressurising you down to run on pure oxygen. 'Sides, you're not wearing a hard-shell suit. You're going to breathe a seventy/thirty nitrogen-oxygen mix; we scrub the carbon dioxide out with these lithium hydroxide canisters and recycle the nitrogen, adding oxygen to order."

"Uh-huh. How do I change tanks?"

"On your own? You don't-there's a trick to it and we don't have time to teach you. You cut over from tank one to tank two with the regulator valve here, then you ask me to change tanks for you. If someone wants you to change their tank, which they won't unless things go pear-shaped in a big way, you do it like this-" He demonstrates on an unmounted backpack and I try to keep track of it. Then he shows me the helmet and the chest-mounted monitors that keep track of my gas supply, temperature, and so on. Finally he seems satisfied. "Well, if you remember all that you're not going to die by accident-at least not immediately. Still happy?"

"Um." I think about it. "It'll have to do. What about radio?"

"Don't worry about it-it's automatic." He flicks a switch or two on my chest panel, evidently making sure of that. "You're on the general channel-everyone will be able to hear you unless they explicitly shut you out. Now…" He picks up a gadget that looks like a pair of underwater digital video cameras strapped with gaffer tape to either side of a black box gizmo of some kind. "Have you ever seen one of these before?"

I peer closely, then unclip the lid on the box and look inside. "I didn't know they'd successfully weaponised that."

He looks surprised. "Can you tell me what it is and how it works?"

"Can I-yeah, I've seen this arrangement before but only in the lab. This chip here is a small custom-built ASIC processor that emulates a neural network that was first identified in the cingulate gyrus of a medusa. Turns out you can find the same pathways in a basilisk, but… well. There's a load of image processing stuff on the front end, behind those video cameras. Now, I would guess that the two cameras are the optical component of this gadget: we're performing some sort of wave superposition on the target, so…"