Charles Stross - The Atrocity Archives

"You can switch your transmitter off," says Hutter, "we've got air." She fiddles with her suit panel: "Looks breathable, too, but don't take my word for it."

"Quiet." Scary Spice looks round. "Mike?"

"Mike here." My radio isn't crackling as much now we're indoors. "No signs of life so far-lots of dusty offices, dead dogs. We've swept the ground floor and it looks as if there's nobody home." He sounds as puzzled as I feel. Where the hell are the bad guys?

"Roger that, Hutter and yon boffin are with me in the guardhouse. We're waiting on reinforcements."

I hear a squeal of metal and look round; Hutter is closing the airlock door again, and it sounds like it hasn't been oiled for fifty years.

"Uh, we have bodies." I jump; it's a different voice, worryingly shaky. Chaitin? "I'm in the third door along on corridor B, left wing, and it isn't pretty."

"Barnes here. Chaitin, sitrep." Alan sounds purposeful.

"They're-looks like a mess room, boss. It's hard to tell, temperature's subzero so everything's frozen but there's a lot of blood. Bodies. They're wearing-yeah, SS uniforms, I'm vague on the unit insignia but it's definitely them. Looks like they shot themselves. Each other. O Jesus, excuse me sir, need a moment."

"Take ten, Greg. What's so bad? Talk to me."

"Must be, uh, at least twenty of them, sir. Freeze-dried, like the doggies: they're kind of mummified. Can't have happened recently. There's a pile against one wall and a bunch around this table, and-one of them is still holding a pistol. Dead as they come. There's some papers on the table."

"Papers. What can you tell me?"

"Not much sir, I don't speak German and that's what they look to be in."

Someone swears creatively. After a moment I realise that it's Chaitin.

" Status , Chaitin!"

"Just trod in-" More swearing. "Sorry, sir." Sound of heavy breathing. "It's safe but, but anyone who comes here better have a strong stomach. Looks like some kind of black magic-"

Hutter taps me on the shoulder and motions me forward: "Howard coming through. Don't touch anything."

The building is a twilight nightmare of narrow corridors, dust and debris, too narrow to turn round in easily with the bulky suit backpacks. Scary Spice leads me through a series of rooms and a mess hall, low benches parked to either side of a wooden table in front of a counter on which sit pans that have tarnished with age. Then we're into a big central hall with a staircase leading up and down, and another corridor, this one with gaping doors-and Chaitin waiting outside the third door with someone else inside.

The scene is pretty much what Chaitin described: table, filing cabinets, pile of withered mummies in grey and black uniforms, black-brown stains across half of them. But the wall behind the door-

"Howard here: I've seen these before," I transmit. "Ahnenerbe-issue algemancy inductance rig. There should be-ah." A rack of stoppered glass bottles gleams from below the thing like a glass printing press with chromed steel teeth. There's a wizened eyeless horror trapped in it, his jaws agape in a perpetual silent scream, straining at manacles drawn tight by dehydrating muscle tissue. I carefully pay no attention to it: throwing up inside a pressure suit would be unwise. Bulldog clips and batteries and a nineteen-inch-wide rack-where's the trough? Answer: below the blood gutters.

"One last summoning, by the look of it, before they all died. Or shot themselves." I trace a finger along the boundary channel of the arcane machine, careful not to touch it: they probably filled the channel with liquid mercury-a conductor-but it's long since evaporated. If it was a possession, that tends to spread by touch, or along electrical conductors. (Visuals, too, although that usually takes serious computer graphics work to arrange.) I turn away from the poor bastard impaled on the torture machine and look at the table. The papers there are brittle with age: I turn one page over, feeling the binder crackling, and see a Ptath transform's eye-warping geometries. "They were summoning something," I say. "I'm not sure what, but it was definitely a possessive invocation." For some reason I have an unaccountable sense of wrongness about the scene. What have I missed?

The mummy with the pistol in its hand seems to be grinning at me.

I flick my radio off and rely on plain old-fashioned speech to keep my words local: "Chaitin," I say slowly, "that corpse. The one with the gun. Did he shoot everyone else here-or could it have been someone else? Was he defending himself?"

The big guy looks puzzled. "I don't see-" He pauses, then sidles round the table until he's as close to the corpse as he can get. "Uh-huh," he says. "Maybe there was someone else here, but he sure looks as if he shot himself. That's funny-"

My radio drowns him out. "Barnes to all: we've found Professor O'Brien. Howard, get your arse downstairs to basement level two, we're going to need your expertise to get her out. Everyone else, eyes up: we have at least one bad guy unaccounted for."

My skin crawls for a moment: What the hell can be wrong with Mo if they need me to help rescue her? Then I notice Chaitin watching me. "Take care," he says gruffly. "You know how to use that thing?"

"This?" I clumsily pat the basilisk gun hanging from my chest pack. "Sure. Listen, don't touch that machine. I mean, like really don't touch it. I think it's dead but you know what they say about unexploded bombs, okay?"

"Go on." He waves me past him at the door and I go out to find Scary Spice crouched in the corridor, eyes swivelling like a chameleon on cocaine.

"Let's go." We head for the stairs, and I can't shed the nagging feeling that I've missed something critically important: that we're being sucked into a giant cobweb of darkness and chilly lies, doing exactly what the monster at its centre wants us to do-all because I've misinterpreted one of the signs around me.

THE BASEMENT LEVEL IS COLDER THAN THE SURFACE rooms and passages. I find Sergeant Pike there, helmet undogged, breath steaming and sparkling in the light of a paraffin lamp someone has coaxed into oily, lambent life. "What kept you?" he asks.

I shrug. "Where is she and how is she?"

He points at the nearer of two corridor entrances; this one is lit by a chain of bioluminescent disposables, so that a ghastly chain of green candlelight marks the route. My stomach feels suddenly hollow. "She's conscious but nobody's touching her till you've given the okay," he says.

Oh great. I follow the chain of ghost lights to the open door-

The door may be wide open but there's no mistaking it for anything other than a cell. Someone's stuck another lantern on the floor, just so I can see what else is inside. The room is almost completely occupied by some kind of summoning rig-not a torture machine like the one upstairs, but something not that far away from it. There's a wooden framework like a four-poster bed, with elaborate pulleys at each corner. Mo is spread-eagled on her back, naked, tied to the uprights, but the effect is just about anything other than kinky-sexy-especially when I see what's suspended above her by way of more pulleys and the same steel cables that loop through her manacles. Each of the uprights is capped by a Tesla coil, there's some kind of bug-fuck generator rig in the corner, and half the guts of an old radar station's HF output stage arranged around the perimeter of a crazy pentacle surrounding the procrustean contraption. It's like a bizarre cross between an electric chair and a rack.

Her eyes are closed. I think she's unconscious. I can't help myself: I fumble with the locking ring on my helmet then raise my visor and take a breath. It's cold in here-it's been about eight hours since she was abducted, so if she's been there that long she's probably halfway to hypothermia already.