Charles Stross - The Atrocity Archives

"Uh-huh. How's my tankage?"

"Dented, and your suit front panel is blown-it took the brunt of the charge, otherwise you'd be a crispy critter right now. Look, I'm going to get things organised in person, seeing all our radios are flaking out." Alan looks round. "Hutter, get these people sorted out and ready to pull back; I want them both mobile within the hour, we've got a lot of shit to move out of here." He glances down at me and winks. "You've done well."

Over the course of the next fifteen minutes I recover enough to sit up against the wall, and Mo just about manages to stop shivering. She leans against me. "Thank you," she says quietly. "That went way beyond-"

Hutter and Chaitin bang in through the door, heaving a couple of bulky kit-bags full of assorted gear: vacuum support underwear, heated outer suit, a new regulator and air tank for my framework, a new backpack and helmet for Mo. "Look at the lovebirds," Chaitin says, apparently amused by us. "On your feet, pretties, got to get you ready to move and ain't nobody going to carry you."

While Hutter is getting Mo into her pressure gear I stumble around the wreckage of the procrustean bed and hunt for my palmtop-dropped when I had to leap for her life. I find it lying on the concrete floor, evidently kicked into a corner of the room, but it's undamaged, which is a big relief. I pick it up and check the thaum level absently, and freeze: something is really not right around here. Following the display I trail around the walls until I find an inexplicably high reading in front of that rack of high tension switchgear. Something is happening here: local entropy is sky-high as if information is being destroyed by irreversible computation in the vicinity. But the rack is switched off. I pocket the small computer and give the rack an experimental yank; I'm nearly knocked off my feet when it slides toward me.

"Hey!" Chaitin is right behind me, shoving me out of the way and pointing his gun into the dark cavity behind the rack.

"Don't," I say tersely. "Look." I switch on my suit headlamp, and promptly wish I hadn't.

"Oh Jesus." Chaitin lowers his gun but doesn't look away. The room behind the instrument rack is another cell: it must have been undisturbed for a long time, but it's so cold that most of the body parts are still recognisable. There's a butcher's shop miasma hanging over it, not decay, exactly, but the smell of death. Enough spare parts for Dr. Frankenstein to make a dozen monsters lie heaped in the room, piled in brown-iced drifts in the corners. "Shut the fucking door," he says distantly, and steps out of my way.

"Anyone got a hacksaw?" I ask.

"You can't be serious-" Chaitin pushes up his visor and stares at me. "Why?"

"I want to take samples from the top few bodies," I say slowly. "I think they may be something to do with the Mukhabarat's Santa Cruz operation."

"You're nuts," he says.

"Maybe, but don't you want to know who these people were?"

"No fucking way, mate," he says. Then he breathes deeply. "Look, I was in Bosnia, y'know, the mass graves?" He glances down and scuffs the floor. "Spent a couple of weeks guarding the forensics guys one summer. The worst thing about those pits, you scrubbed like crazy but in the end you had to throw your boots away. Once that smell gets into the leather it won't leave." He looks away. "You're fucking out of your skull if you think I'm going to help you take trophies."

"So just get me an axe," I snap irritably. (Then I wince again and wish I hadn't.) He looks at me oddly for a moment, as if trying to make his mind up whether or not to get physical, then turns and stomps off.

When Chaitin returns he's carrying a fireman's axe and an empty kit-bag. He leaves me alone for ten minutes while I discover just how difficult it is to chop through the wrist bones of a corpse that's been frozen for days or months. I find that I'm angry, very angry indeed-so angry, in fact, that the job doesn't upset me. I want to find the bastard who did this and give him a taste of his own medicine, and if chopping off dead hands is the price then it's a price I'm happy to pay-with interest.

But why do I still feel as if I'm missing something obvious? Like, maybe, what the demon-dybbuk, possessor, whatever-you-call-it-lured us here for?

WHEN I COME OUT OF THE CELLAR CLUTCHING MY grisly handbag, Hutter and Mo are gone. Chaitin is stooging around, shuffling from foot to foot as he waits for me. "Let's go," he says, so I heft the bag at him.

"Got it." We head back up the corridor past the glow-tubes and I glance over my shoulder just once, breath steaming in the frigid air. Then I lower my visor and lock it in place, check my regulator, and listen to the hiss of cool air through my helmet. "Where is everybody?"

"Boss man's up top arming the gadget; your squeeze is on her way back to the gateway."

"Great," I say, and I mean it. This place is getting to me; I almost want to dance a little jig at the thought of blowing it to atoms. "Did anybody find any documentation?"

"Documentation? Tons of it. These guys were Germans, dude. You ever worked with the fucking Wehrmacht, you'd be able to tell a story about documentation, too."

"Huh." We hit the bottom of the stairs. Scary Spice is waiting for us.

"Go on up," he says to Chaitin. He stops me: "You, wait." He twists a dial on my chest pack: "Hear me?"

"Yeah," I say, "loud and clear. Has anyone seen any sign of the bastard who kidnapped Mo?"

"The target, you mean?" Scary hefts his heavily insulated gun and for a moment I'm glad I can't see through his face mask. "Naah, but you're going up the stairs right now and I'm following you, and if you see anyone behind me yell like hell."

"That," I say fervently, "is fine by me." Already the shadows are lengthening as the glow-tubes slowly burn out.

There's crosstalk and terse chatter all over the radio channel Scary has tuned me to; I get the impression of three teams retreating to prearranged positions, keeping their eyes peeled for company. Some evil bastard demon has been here in the past couple of hours, wearing a stolen body: Can't we move faster? Evidently not. "Timer set to seven thousand seconds by my mark," Alan cuts in on the common channel. "This is your hundred and ten minute warning, folks. I've pulled the spoiler chain and the initiator is now live; anyone still here in two hours better have some factor one-billion sunblock. Sound off by name."

Everyone seems to be accounted for, except the three outside. "Okay, pull out in LIFO order. Scary, Chaitin, make sure Howard's in tow and cycle when ready."

"Right, boss." Chaitin. "C'mon, you, let's go."

"Okay." I wait while Chaitin cycles through the airlock into the garage, then open the door and squeeze into the cramped closetlike space. "I'm on tank one, everything working."

"It better be. Okay, cycle yourself through."

I wait for a tense two minutes while the air hisses out of a tiny tube and I feel the pressure suit tightening around me. Oddly, I begin to feel warmer once I'm in partial vacuum; the chilly air in the redoubt was sapping my body heat. Presently the outer door swings open. "Move, move!"

I walk out into the garage, open doors gaping at the ink-black sky, then out into the courtyard in front of the building. Chaitin's waiting there. Someone's parked that electric trolley next to the wall, but the little half-track thing with a motorcycle's front wheel is missing. "Someone taking souvenirs?" I ask.

A burst of static that I just about decode as "What?" tells me that the interference is worse than before; I glance up and see red stars, a dull red swirl of galaxy overhead… a distinct pink tinge to the moon, in fact.

I point at where the Kettenkrad was parked. "There, it's gone," I say. "Who took it?"