Charles Stross - The Atrocity Archives

Chaitin shrugs. I look round. "Go there." He points at the main gatehouse. I start walking. The moonlight is dim, rosy: either I'm reeling lightheaded or… or what?

It's about a kilometre to the wall where our unseen enemy opened the gate to Amsterdam, and with no sign of him in the vicinity I have time to do a little bit of thinking. Looking straight up I see only darkness; the visible stars mostly stretched in a wide belt above the horizon, the moon an evil-faced icon staring down at us. The power to suck all the life and heat out of a planet like this-it's horrifying. While a sacrificial murder will get you a hot-line to a demon capable of possessing you, or a window to some universe so alien you can't comprehend its physical laws, it takes a lot of power to open a physical gate to another version of the Earth. Shadow Earths interfere with each other, and it's very difficult to generate congruence. But whatever happened here…

I try to picture what might have happened. I can only come up with two scenarios:

Scenario one. An Ahnenerbe detachment in Germany, some time in April of 1945. They know they're losing, but defeat is not an acceptable option to them. They quickly gather all the supplies they can: foodstuffs, machine tools, seeds, fuel. Using a handful of captured enemy POWs, a gate is opened to somewhere cold and airless where they can wait out the hue and cry before making a break for home.

Nope, that doesn't work. How'd they build this fortress? Or mess with the moon?

Scenario two. A divergent history; a different branch of our own universe, so close to our own timeline that the energy it takes to open a full bridge between the two realities approximates the mass-energy of the universe itself. The point of departure, the fork in the river of time, is an invocation the Ahnenerbe attempted late in the war-but not too late. It's an act of necromancy so bloody that the priests of Xipe Totec would have cringed in horror, so gruesome that Himmler would have protested. They opened a gateway. We thought it was just a tactical move, a way to move men and materials about without being vulnerable to Allied attack-shunt them into another world, travel across it bypassing their enemies, then open a gateway back to our own continuum. But what if they were doing something more ambitious? What if they were trying to open a channel to one of the nameless places where the infovores dwell: beings of near-infinite cold, living in the darkened ghosts of expanded universes that have succumbed to the ancient forces of proton decay and black hole evaporation? Invoking Godlike powers to hold their enemies at bay, the forces of the Red Army and the Western Allies are held in check…

What happened next?

Pacing through the petrified forest I can see it as clearly as a television documentary. A wind of desolation and pain screams out of the heart of Europe, hurling bombers from the skies like dandelion seeds. A darkness rises in the west, a maelstrom that sucks Zukhov's divisions in like splinters of a shattered mast sent flying in a hurricane. The SS necromancers are exultant: their demons harrow the Earth in stolen bodies, scouring it clean of enemy forces, eating the souls of the untermenschen and spitting up their bones. Snow falls early as fimbulwinter sets in, for the ice giants of legend have returned to do the bidding of the thousand-year Reich, and the Führer's every dream shall be made real. A pale sun that warms nothing gazes down across a wilderness of ice and fire, ravaged by the triumph of the will.

They only realise how badly they'd miscalculated some months later as the daylight hours shorten, and shorten further-until the equinox passes, the temperature continues to fall as the sunlight dims, and the giants cease to do their bidding.

Götterdämmerung has come for the victorious Third Reich…

Up the low rise with the wall on the other side, I turn round and look back at the redoubt, at the last island of warmth in a cold world that's been sucked dry. I contemplate it for a minute or so. "Had a thought," I say aloud, and get a burst of static in return.

I look round. Chaitin is standing farther up the hillside; he waves at me. More static. "You there?" I ask, fiddling with my radio controls. "Can you hear me?"

He walks toward me, brandishing something. I focus on a coil of cable with a plug on the end, but as he approaches the static begins to clear up. He pokes it at my chest pack but I bat his hand away. "Speak," he says roughly.

I take a deep breath: "I need to make some measurements. There is something very, very wrong with this whole picture, you know? Why is it so cold? Why are our suit radios all malfunctioning? What killed everyone in that bunker? Seems to me that Alan needs to know. Hell! I need to know-it's important."

Through his suit helmet Chaitin's expression is unreadable. "Explain."

I shiver with a sudden realisation. "Look, they summoned something that hunkered down and sucked all the fucking energy out of this universe, and if Alan sets off an H-bomb-what do you think is going to happen?"

"Talk more." Chaitin offers me the cable again.

I point to my damaged chest pack, then point my finger straight up. "Look, the stars are all reddish, and they're too far apart. That's number one. Red shift means they're all flying away from each other like crazy! That, or the energy in the light they're emitting is being sapped by something. I figure that effect is also what's screwing with our radios: in this universe the Planck constant is changing. Number two, the sun-the sun's gone out. It went out a few decades ago, that's why the temperature's down to forty absolute and dropping; the only thing keeping the Earth above cosmic background temperature is the fact that it's a honking great reservoir of hot rocks, with enough thorium and uranium mixed in that decay heat will keep it simmering for billions of years. But that's losing energy faster than it should, too, because something here is distorting the laws of physics. Third: for all we know all the other suns have gone out, too-the light we see from the stars is fossil radiation, it's been travelling for years, centuries."

I take a deep breath and shift my feet. Chaitin isn't saying anything; he's just looking around, looking for signs in the sky or the earth. "Something is eating energy, and information," I say. "Our primary objective-in coming here-is to find out what's going on and report back. I'm saying we haven't found out yet, and what the captain doesn't know can hurt us all."

Chaitin turns back to face me.

"It makes sense, doesn't it?" I say. "Like, it all hangs together?"

He holds up a torch to illuminate his face through his visor. He's grinning at me with a face I haven't seen before: "Sehr gut," he says, then he drops the torch, releases the catches, and lifts his helmet off. Luminous worms of light writhe soundlessly behind his eyelids, twisting in the empty space of his skull, just like the thing that took Fred from Accounting. The out-gassing air from his suit wreathes him in vapour as he leans toward me, grabbing, trying to make a close flesh-to-flesh contact seeing as his comms-cable gambit has failed. Just one moment of electrical conduction-

The thing that occupies Chaitin's skin and bone is not very intelligent: it's forgotten that I'm wearing a suit, too, and that these suits are designed to take a fair bit of abuse. Still, it's pretty freaky. I drop my sack and hop backward, nearly going arse-over-ears as gravity seems to suck at my backpack. The possessed body scrabbles toward me and I can see, very clearly, a trickle of blood bubbling from his nose as I fumble for the basilisk gun at my waist, grab onto it with both hands, and punch both red buttons with my thumbs. For a panicky moment I think that it's dead, batteries drained by the chilling cold out here-then all hell breaks loose.