Charles Stross - The Atrocity Archives

Well, yes, otherwise I'd never have volunteered for active duty in the first place. Which is why, half an hour later, I find myself standing on a purple-painted hotel staircase beneath a portrait of Martin Heidegger, breathing through an oxygen mask and waiting to follow a dumpy little tracked robot, half a platoon of territorial SAS, and an armed hydrogen bomb through a rip in the spacetime continuum.

BLURRED SHADOWS DANCE ACROSS THE VIDEO screen, grey and black textures like ripped velvet laid over volcanic ash. On the floor in front of my feet the coil of cable unspools, snaking into darkness. Hutter, the equipment tech with the control panel, is hunched over it like a video game addict, twitching her joystick with gloved hands. I lean over behind Alan, who has the ringside view; I have to lean because the backpack is a solid mass, thirty kilograms pushing me forward if I even think about relaxing.

"One metre forward; now pan left."

The screen jerks. There's a thin wail as air vents through the doorframe and the cable reels out, then the scenery on screen begins to rotate. We see more blurred grey rubble, then a view that swoops away, down to a distant sea. As the camera pans round further the back of the robot comes into view, trailing a white umbilical back into the incongruous side of a wall. There isn't enough light to examine the wall, or enough scan lines: it's a night-vision camera, but we're operating in starlight. The camera continues to rotate until it's pointing back to its original bearing. There is no sign of life.

"Looks clear," someone whispers in my ear, voice tinny and half-masked by static.

"If you want to go first, feel free to volunteer," Alan says dryly. "Mary. See any hot spots?"

"Nothing," the tech reports.

"Okay. Bearing zero six zero, forward ten or until you see anything, then halt and report."

She follows through and the little robot lurches forward into the grey and black landscape on the other side of the gate. "Ambient air pressure, ten pascals. Ambient temperature-thermocouple gives an error, FLIR is flat lined, but that backup sensor is claiming somewhere between forty-five and sixty Kelvin. Gravimetric-it's Earth-like. Uh, I'm worried about the power, boss. Battery load is normal, but we're losing power like crazy-I think it's in danger of freezing solid. We never designed a robot to do this kind of environment-it's colder than summer on Pluto."

Someone whistles tunelessly until Pike tells them to shut up.

"How does this affect our environment model?" Alan asks aloud. "The suits are only certified down to a hundred and twenty Kelvin."

Someone else clears their throat. "Donaldson here. I think we should be okay, sir. We're only going to be in contact with the ground via the feet, and we've got plenty of insulation-and heating-there. No air means no convective loss, and we're not going to radiate any faster just because ambient is cooler. Our regulators use a countercurrent loop to warm incoming air from whatever we breathe out, so they're not in danger of icing up. The real risk is that we're going to be more visible on infrared, and if we get into a firefight and have to take cover we are going to get frostbitten so fast it isn't funny. That lake is probably liquid nitrogen-don't walk on any shiny blue ice, it'll be frozen oxygen and the heat from your feet will flash-boil it. Oh, and it's diamagnetic: your compasses won't work."

"Thank you for that reminder, Jimmy," says Alan. "Any more compelling insights into why the laws of physics are not our friends?"

The camera pans round: same landscape, but now we see the gate framed by a low mound of dirt heaped up on one side, and a broken-down wall on the other. The lake is clearer, and some sort of rectilinear structure is just visible over the crest of the ridge.

"I don't understand the temperature," Donaldson says pensively. "There's something about it I can't quite put my finger on."

"Well, you're going to get a chance to put your finger on it quite soon. Mary, still no hot spots? Good. Alpha team-ready, insert."

On the other side of the doorway three guys wearing dark, insulated suits and backpacks quickly duck through the open gate and are gone from our universe. The robot's camera, pointing backward, catches them for posterity: ghosts leaping over it and passing out of view to either side.

"Chaitin: clear, over."

"Smith: nothing in view. Over."

"Hammer: clear, over."

The camera pans round and takes in three shapes hunched low behind the bluff, one of them pointing a stubby pipe back past the robot.

"Don, if you'd be so good as to take a look round the rear of the gate. Mike, Bravo team insert."

Three anonymous bulky figures push past behind me, through the pressure doors erected in front of the hotel room: a gust of wind howls past my helmet as they enter the gate. The camera pans-

"Chaitin: nothing behind the gate. Landscape is clear, rising to hills in the middle distance. I see some kind of geometric inscription on the ground and one, no, two bodies. Male, naked, gutted with a sharp implement. They look to be frozen-handcuffed behind their backs."

My heart flops over and I begin to breathe again, ashamed but relieved that neither of them is Mo. "Howard here: that'll be the human sacrifices they used to open the gate," I say. "Is there a kind of metal tripod nearby with an upturned dish on top?"

"Chaitin: nope, somebody's cleaned up around here."

"Bloody typical," somebody mutters out of turn.

"Charlie, insert," says Andy. He taps me on the arm: "C'mon, Bob. Time to party."

Ahead of us, Pike picks up the controls on something that looks like an electric street cleaner-the kind of wheeled cart you walk behind-and drives it forward toward the doors. It nudges through and the gale almost sucks me forward; I follow in his wake, trying not to think about the cart's payload. You can make a critical mass out of about six kilos of plutonium, but you need various other bits and pieces to make a bomb; while they've been fitted inside an eight-inch artillery shell before now, nobody has yet built a nuke that you can carry easily-especially when you're wearing a thirty-kilo life-support backpack.

Mist spurts out around me as I walk through the gate, and suddenly the ground under my feet isn't carpet anymore: it's crumbly, crunchy, like a hard frosted snowfall over gravel. I hear a faint buzz as heat exchangers switch on in my helmet, using the warmth of my breath to heat the air I'm breathing in. My skin prickles, abruptly feeling tight, my suit seems to contract all around me, and I emit an enormous and embarrassing fart. External air pressure: zero. Temperature: low enough to freeze oxygen. Jesus, it is springtime on Pluto.

Pike drives his gadget forward about five metres, halfway to the parked robot, then stops and begins unreeling a spool of cable from on top of it. He almost backs into me before I get out of his way. "Bob, take this." He hands me some kind of joystick-like gadget with a trigger built into it, plugged into the wire.

"What is it?" I ask, thumbing my intercom to his channel.

"Dead man's handle. We use two of them to detonate while we're out of range of the permissive action link signal-this side of the gate. Go on, pull the trigger, I've got the other one. It's perfectly safe to let go of one trigger at a time, it only goes bang if both triggers are released for ten seconds at the same time."

"Gee, thanks. How long did you say this wire is?"

I lumber in a circle, taking care not to let the wire get twisted around my feet as I take in the view. The gate is inscribed in a low wall; our footsteps have obscured the transient map in front of it, but behind the wall that supports the aperture the pattern is more or less intact (along with the two victims who were sacrificed to open it). The ground is crunchy, like loose soil after a heavy frost. Behind us and to the left and right it slopes up toward a low ridge; in front, the ground slopes down and broadens out into a valley. The stars overhead are unwinking, dimensionless points of light in a harsh vacuum. They look reddish, demonic eyes staring down at me; a universe of red dwarves, long after the sun has burned down.