Charles Stross - The Atrocity Archives

I shuffle closer, careful not to cross the solder-dribbled circuit inscribed on the stone floor. "Mo?"

She twitches. "Bob? Bob! Get me out of here!" She's hoarse and there's an edge of panic in her voice.

I take a shuddering, icy breath. "That's exactly what I'm going to do. Only question is how. " I glance around. "Anyone there?" I call.

"Be with you in a sec," replies Hutter from outside the door. "Waiting for the boss."

I go fumbling in my padded pocket for the PDA, because before I go anywhere near that bed I want to take some readings. "Talk to me, Mo. What happened? Who put you here?"

"Oh, God, he's out there-"

She just about goes into spasm, straining at the cables in panic. "Stop that!" I shout, on edge and jittery myself. "Mo, stop moving, that thing could cut loose any moment!"

She stops moving so suddenly that the bed-rack-summoning-bench shakes. "What did you say?" she asks out of one corner of her mouth.

I squat, trying to see the base of the frame she's lying on. "That thing. I'm going to untie you just as soon as I've checked that it isn't wired. Dead man's handle. Looks like a Vohlman-Knuth configuration-powered down right now, but stick some current through those inductors and it could turn very nasty indeed." I've tapped up an interesting diagnostic program on the palmtop and the Hall-effect sensor embedded in the machine is giving back some even more interesting readings. Interesting, in the sense of the Chinese proverb-"May you live in interesting times."-or more likely die in them. "You use it for necromantic summonings. Demons, they used to call them: now they're primary manifestations, probably 'cause that doesn't frighten the management. Who put you on it?"

"This skinny guy, with a suntan and a German accent-"

"From Santa Cruz?"

"No, I'd never seen him before."

"Shit. Did he have any friends? Or do anything to set up that rack over there?"

I inspect the top of the framework. The chandelier-thing hangs from the roof of the execution machine like a bizarre, three-dimensional guillotine blade: cut any of the ropes holding Mo to the bed and it will fall. I'm not sure what it's made of-glass and bits of human bone seem to figure in the design, but so do colour-coded wires and gears-but the effect will be about as final as flicking the switch on a frog in a liquidiser. Trouble is, I'm not sure the damned thing won't fall anyway, if someone switches on the device.

"No," Mo says, but she sounds doubtful.

I'm checking around the foot of the necromantic bed now, and it's a good thing the instrument's got a log display: lots of very bad shit has gone down here, ghosts howling in the wires, information destroyed and funnelled out of our spacetime through weirdly tangled geometries of silver wire and the hair of hanged women. Bastards. I really ought to keep Mo talking.

"I was asleep," she says. "I remember a dream-howling air, very cold, being carried somewhere, unable to move. Like being paralysed, scary as hell and I couldn't breathe. Then I woke up down here. He was leaning over me. My head aches like the mother of all hangovers. What happened?"

"Did he say anything?" I ask. "Make any adjustments?"

"He said I'd served my purpose and this would be my final contribution. His eyes, they were really weird. Luminous. What do you mean, make adjust-" She tries to raise her head and the bed creaks. There's an ominous buzzing sound from the control panel at the far side of the room and a red light comes on.

"Oh shit," I say, as the door opens and two soldiers in vacuum gear come in and the lights flicker. I see the chandelier-like thing above Mo sway on its ropes, hear the bedframe creak. As she gathers breath to scream I clumsily jump onto the bed and brace myself on hands and knees above her. "Someone cut the fucking cables, pull her out, and cut the fucking wires! " I yell. I'm kneeling on one of them when the descending mass of obsidian and bone and wire lands on my backpack with a crunch-and I discover the hard way that the thing is electrified, and Mo is wired to earth.

MY HEAD IS SPINNING, I FEEL NAUSEOUS, AND MY right knee feels like it's on fire. What am I doing-

"Bob, we're going to pull it off you now. Can you hear me?"

Yeah, I can hear you. I want to throw up. I grunt something. The crushing weight on my back begins to lift. I blink stupidly at the wooden slats in front of me, then someone grabs my arm and tries to pull me sideways. Their touch hurts; someone, maybe me, screams, and someone else yells "Medic!"

Seconds or minutes later I realise that I'm lying on my back and someone is pounding on my chest. I blink and try to grunt something. "Can you hear me?" they say.

"Yeah- oof ."

The pounding stops for a moment and I force myself to breathe deeply. I know I should be lying on something, but what? I open my eyes properly. "Oh, that wasn't good. My knee-"

Alan leans over my field of view; people are bustling about behind him. "What was that all about?" he asks.

"Is Mo-"

"I'm all right, Bob." Her voice comes from right behind me. I start, and it feels like someone's clubbed me behind the ear again-my head is about to split open. "That-thing-" her voice is shaky.

"It's an altar," I say tiredly. "Should have recognised the design sooner. Alan, the bad guy is loose here. Somewhere. Mo was bait for a trap."

"Explain," Alan says, almost absent-mindedly. I roll my head round and see that Mo is sitting with her back to the wall, legs stretched out in front of her; someone's given her one of the red survival suits, no good in vacuum but enough to keep her warm, and she's got a silver foil blanket stretched around her shoulders. Behind her, the altar is a splintered wreck.

"It's not so hard to open a gate and bring an information entity through, especially if you've got a body ready and waiting for it at the other end, right? Physical gates are harder, and the bigger you want 'em, the more energy or life you have to expend to stabilize it. Anyway, this is an altar; there are a couple like it in the basement of that museum we came to visit. You put the sacrifice on the altar, wire it to an invocation grid, and kill the victim-that's what the chandelier was for-channelling what comes back out. Only this one-the guards and wards around the altar are buggered. They'd offer no protection at all once the summoning was manifest, and the thing would take over anyone it could come into contact with. Transfer by electrical conduction, that's how a lot of these things spread."

"So you tried to shield her with your body," says Alan, "How touching!"

"Huh." I cough and wince at the answering pain in my head. "Not really; I figured the scaffold wouldn't be able to cut through my air tanks. And if it killed her we'd all be dead, anyway."

"What was it set up to summon?" Mo asks. Her voice still hoarse.

"I don't know." I frown. "Nothing friendly, that's for sure. But then, this isn't the Ahnenerbe, is it? Even though they built this place, they've been dead for a long time. Suicide, by the look of it. This bastard's some kind of possessor entity-jumps from body to body. It's been shadowing you from the States, but when it got you all it did was use you as raw material in a summoning sacrifice. Doesn't make sense, does it? If it wanted you so bad, why not just walk up to you, shake hands, and move into your head?"

"It doesn't matter right now." Alan stands. "We're leaving soon. According to Roland the gate's shrinking; we've got about four hours to pull out, and your mystery kidnapper hasn't tried to make a break for it. What we're going to do is put a guard on the gate, get the hell out of here, and leave the demo charge ticking. He won't be able to sneak back around us, and the gadget will toast what's left of this place."