Charles Stross - The Atrocity Archives

Alpha and Bravo teams have fanned out ahead and behind the wall, advancing in a curious duck-walking crouch from cover to cover. I spot a lump sticking out of the ground about five metres away, and plod over to inspect it. It's a tree stump, shattered half a metre above the ground and hard as ice. I reach out to touch it and a thin mist bursts from the wood-I yank my fingers back before the stream of gas can chill them into frostbite. Wood crumbles and falls away from the stump, shattered by the warmth. I shudder inside my layers of compression fabric and insulation, and fart again.

There are boot imprints in the ground behind the gate, and they don't look like ours.

"Howard, get back to the gate. Don't tangle up the wire you're holding."

"Understood." I stomp back toward the gate, collecting loops of wire from the handle (which I have carefully avoided arming).

"Give." An anonymous, bulky figure holds out a hand: above the visor I see the name BLEVINS. I pass Roland the trigger and he attaches it to his chest with a Velcro pad, then heads for the low rise behind the gate.

"Howard, Barnes here. I'm on the rise behind you, twenty metres upslope. Come tell me what you think of this." A click as he hops frequency, to check on everybody else in turn.

I come up beside him on the rise and find him hefting a heavily insulated camera in front of his faceplate. Someone-Sergeant Howe, I think-is crouching farther up the slope with some kind of shotgun or grenade launcher in his arms. "Come on and look at this," Alan says; he sounds mildly amused as he waves me forward. "Keep your head low and no sudden movements. That's far enough, Bob."

I can just peep over the ridge, which falls away abruptly in front of me. More dead tree stumps; the ground beneath me, the crunching-now I can see that it's grass, freeze-dried and mummified beneath a layer of carbon dioxide frost. Hills or low mounds of some kind rise in the near distance, and then-

"Disneyland?" I hear myself saying.

Alan laughs quietly. "Not Disneyland. Think Mad King Ludwig's last commission, as executed by Buckminster Fuller." Cheesecake crenellations, battlements with machicolations, moat and drawbridge and turrets. Spiky pointed roofs on the towers-like the police stations in West Belfast, designed to deflect incoming mortar fire. Arrow slots filled with mirror glass half a metre thick. Radomes and antenna masts in the courtyard where you'd expect armoured knights to mount up.

"I didn't know the RUC were Cthulhu-worshippers."

"They're not, laddie," says Howe, and I flush. "Check out the slope up to that moat. Probably got rammed earth behind those walls, but they're not really expecting direct artillery fire. Intruders on foot, rockets, I don't know what-but not tanks or direct fire."

"They won," Alan says distantly. "This isn't a fortification. Bob, I should apologise: it is a police station." Light glistens on the Gestapo battlements as I try to understand what he means.

"What happened to them?" I ask.

"Look," says Howe, pointing off to the left. I follow his direction and get my first inkling of just how far beyond our experience this world is. From up here the moon is visible, gibbous and close to the horizon; but the familiar man-in-the-moon pattern of marias and seas has been erased, replaced by a shadow-scribed visage carved across the entire lunar surface in runes ten kilometres deep. It's astonishing to behold, a miracle testimonial to one man's vanity on a scale that makes Mount Rushmore or the pyramids look like a child's sandcastle. And from the small tuft of moustache to the keynote cowlick of hair, the face is instantly recognisable.

From a quarter of a million miles away, Hitler's image stares at me across a land given over to ice and shadow. And I know the Ahnenerbe can't be far away.

THE ARTISTS' RIFLES STORM THE AHNENERBE'S secret fortress with speed and élan, moderated only by tactical caution and a degree of perplexity that deepens as they determine that the castle is, in fact, unoccupied.

First in is the little reconnaissance robot, portaged into position and released by a couple of tense soldiers half a kilometre away from the rest of the expedition. As it rolls onto the flat killing apron around the redoubt, Bravo team moves like ghosts through the petrified forest on the other side of the castle. Everybody is tense: nobody talks on radio while their line of sight is on the castle, and nobody wants to be visible, either-on infrared against this chill landscape, a human being will stand out like a magnesium flare.

The robot rolls out onto the killing apron in front of the castle, little puffs of snow fountaining up behind its treads. At this point if anyone is guarding it we'd expect to see fireworks, but nothing happens: nobody shoots, nothing lights up. I hunch over behind Hutter's shoulder, watching the video feed via the secure fibre-optic cable. The castle is dark, except for a central building that glows red hot, two hundred and fifty degrees hotter than the ambient temperature. It silhouettes the battlements, towers, and radomes nicely.

Alan circles a hand above his head twice, and a long way away a sleeping dragon erupts. A dot of light sizzles across the frozen landscape on a jet of flame and slams into the outer door of the gatehouse: lumps of stone and metal tumble silently through the empty vacuum above it. Things begin to happen very quickly as Alpha team lays down fire on the gatehouse and Bravo team skids out across the ice behind the castle and makes for the forbiddingly high walls. A chain of fireworks erupts from the ground and bursts over the battlements in front of them, then-

Nothing. Nothing but silence and the jerky movements of Alan's men. They reach the foot of the wall and swarm up it as if they aren't wearing heavy backpacks, while a second Dragon launcher pops a rocket off at the front of the castle and someone-Sergeant Howe, I think-beats the courtyard with machine-gun fire that makes small mushroom clouds of white vapour burst from the ground. And there's still no answering fire.

"Alpha secure," someone grunts in my headphones. Then: "Bravo secure. Cease fire, cease fire, we've got an empty venue."

"Empty? Confirm." It's Alan's voice. He doesn't sound perturbed, but-

"Alpha here, the place is empty ," insists whoever's using that call sign. "As in abandoned."

"Bravo confirms, Mike here. There's a dead truck in the courtyard but no sign of life up here. Dunno about the central target, but if they've retreated in there they aren't coming out. They wouldn't have heard us, anyway." He sounds nervous, breathy.

"Mike, keep under cover, don't assume anything. Hammer, close in fast and secure the gatehouse. Chaitin, lay on the central blockhouse but hold fire on my word. Charlie team move in."

Alan stands up and runs forward, crouching close to the ground; across the landscape I can see the others moving toward the castle's shattered gates-popping up and lunging forward for a few seconds then diving flat to the ground, ready to fire.

Still nothing happens. What's going on? I wonder. Only one way to find out: I stand up and jog forward heavily, feeling the backpack ramming my feet down onto the frozen ground. The empty killing apron is about a hundred metres wide and I feel really naked as I step out onto it, out of the cover of the petrified forest. But there's no sign of life in the castle. Nothing at all untoward happens as I trot forward and, panting, heave myself into the shadow of the gatehouse.

It looms overhead, a grey mound of concrete or stone in the darkness; a narrow window, dark as the crypt, overlooks the entranceway. The gates are solid slabs of wood bound in metal, but they lean drunkenly away from the huge hole that the Dragon blew between them. I pause, and someone whacks me in the back: "Howard, get down !"