Charles Stross - The Atrocity Archives

"Right." Alan looks pensive. "And how do you think it's going to do this?"

"The demolition gadget. What yield have you set it to?" I ask.

Howe raises an eyebrow. "Tell him," says Alan.

"It's a selective yield gadget," says Howe. "We can set it to anything from fifteen kilotons to a quarter of a megaton-it's a mechanical process, screw jacks adjust the gap between the fusion sparkplug and the initiator charge so that we get more or less fusion output. Right now it's at the upper end of the yield curve, dialled all the way up to city-buster size. What's this got to do with anything?"

"Well." I lick my lips; it's really cold in here now and my breath is steaming. "To open a gate big enough to bring through a large creature like whatever ate this universe takes a whole lot of entropy. The Ahnenerbe did it in this universe by ritually murdering roughly ten million people: information destruction increases entropy. But you can do it in other ways-an H-bomb is a really great entropy and energy generator, it minimizes the information content of lots of stuff." They look blank: I glare at them. "Look, it's the intersection between thermodynamics and information theory, right? Information content is inversely proportional to entropy, entropy is a measure of how well randomized a system is-that's one of the core assumptions of magic, right? That you can transfer energy between universes via the platonic realm of ordered information-mathematics. I think what this monster has been doing all along was raising enough hell via its minor agents to provoke a response-one in which we'd lash out, giving it all the juice it needs to expand the gate. As it is, the minor gate it yanked Mo through is shrinking; I figure that was all it could manage. It's drained so much energy from this universe already that it had to wait for precisely the right moment before it dared open that one; this place is falling apart, and there may not be enough power for the monster to open even one more minor gate. Have you noticed how the stars are going out and we're getting radio interference? I think what we're seeing is fossil starlight-what's left of this universe may only be a bit larger than the solar system, and it's shrinking at close to light-speed. Give it another few hours and it'll collapse like a soap bubble, taking the ice giant with it. Unless we feed it, or them, or whatever the hell it is, enough energy to shore open the gate to our own world and expand it until they can squeeze through."

"Ah." Alan looks as if he's just swallowed something unpleasant. "So. It's your considered opinion that our best course of action would be to disable the bomb and retire, hmm?"

"That's about the size of it," I agree. "Where did you plant the gadget anyway?"

"Downstairs; but that's a bit of a sore point," Alan comments airily. "The bomb's armed and we've switched over from manual detonation control via the dead man's handle to the internal timer. But there's a catch. You see, Her Majesty's Government doesn't really like the idea of leaving armed hydrogen bombs lying around the place without proper supervision. PAL control is fine, and so is a detonation wire and dead man's handle, but these things are designed in case they might get overrun, and we wouldn't want to hand an H-bomb on a plate to some random troublemaker, what?"

Alan begins to pace. Alan pacing, that's a bad sign. "Once we've inserted the initiator, dialled a yield, armed the detonators, punched in the permissive action codes, set the timer, then removed the control wires, nothing's going to stop it. Can't even open it up: someone messes with the tamper piece, it calls 'tilt' and the game's over. Y'see, we might be a Soviet Guards Motor Rifle formation that's just captured the bridge it's strapped to. Or a bunch of uglies from the backwoods behind the Khyber Pass. So, as you can understand, even conceding that letting it blow here and now might be a very bad idea, it's going to go. Unless you fancy trying your hand at dissecting a booby-trapped, ticking H-bomb, and I don't recall seeing UXB training on your résumé."

He glances at his watch. "Only another fifty-seven minutes to go, lad. We can probably make it to the gate if we leave in less than half an hour, as long as there aren't too many of the blighters left outside-so I'd hurry up if I was you."

"Could we take it with us?" I ask.

He barks a short laugh. "What, you think they'd thank us for dragging a live quarter-megaton bomb back into one of the most densely populated cities in Europe?"

"They can't stop it then?"

"Take an act of God to stop it now," Howe says with gloomy satisfaction. "Take an act of God to get us all out of here alive, too. Bet you're wishing you hadn't come back!"

I lick my lips, but my tongue seems to have turned to dry leather. Leathery, like one of Brains's weirdly scrambled-in-its-own-shell eggs. Which reminds me: suddenly what I have to do comes crystal clear. "I think I know how to get your people out regardless of whether there are any revenants outside," I say. "Same way I got in here without anyone spotting me. As for the bomb-what if just a bit of the implosion charge goes off prematurely? Say, at one end of it?"

Alan looks at me oddly. "How are you going to do that?"

"Never mind. What happens if ? If, if. Way I remember it, all nuclear weapons these days use a core of plutonium and a set of shaped charges that interlock around it. When they go off, they have to be really precisely timed or the core doesn't implode properly, and if it doesn't implode it doesn't reach critical mass, and if it doesn't go supercritical it doesn't go bang. Right?" I'm almost bouncing up and down. "There's some stuff I need just outside the airlock-a bag of severed hands, a basilisk gun. I've got the rest of the kit here. How many of us are there upstairs, roundabout, who need to walk out? The sack has enough samples cut from execution victims to make Hands of Glory for everyone-walk right past the lurkers in the forest. If someone goes and gets them right now. As for the bomb…"

I'm still thinking about the bomb as Sergeant Howe wordlessly ducks into the airlock and I hear the hiss of depressurisation. Ticking, ticking. The bomb's booby-trapped. I need to figure out a way of reaching through the case, reaching past the wires and the polystyrene foam spacers around the plutonium rod, past the surrounding parcels of lithium deuteride wrapped in depleted uranium, through the steel casing of the A-bomb trigger-

Alan is standing in front of me, leaning in my face. "Bob."

"Yeah." The basilisk gun is the solution. I think …

"Hand of Glory. Tell me what the hell I need to know."

"A Hand of Glory is fabricated from the hand and wrist of someone who has been wrongly executed. A fairly simple circuit is inscribed around the radius and ulna and the fingertips are ignited. What it does is a limited invocation that results in the bearer becoming invisible. In effect. There are variations, like the inversion laser-stick a phase-conjugate mirror on the base and it makes a serious mess of whatever the hand's pointed at-but the original use of the hand is as a disintermediating tool for observer/subject interactions. Or so Eugene Wigner insisted. How many people have you got?"

The airlock door is cycling: Alan crouches, gun levelled on the door. He waves me off to one side impatiently.

It's Howe. No luminous worms behind his face plate; he hefts a lumpy, misshapen sack and my basilisk gun as he steps through the door.

"Seven, plus yourself. You were saying?" Alan asks.

"Give me." I take the sack. It's like peeling potatoes, I tell myself, just like peeling potatoes. "Anyone got a roll of duct tape? And a pen? Great, now clear the fuck away and give me room to breathe." Just like peeling potatoes, strange vegetables that grow in a soil of horror, watered with blood. A lot of the original bits of folklore surrounding the Hand of Glory are just that. You don't need a candle made of human fat, horse dung, and suchlike, with a wick made of the hair of a hanged man. You don't need fingers from the fetus of a hanged pregnant woman, amputated stealthily at midnight. All you need is a bunch of hands, some wire or solder, a pen, a digital-analogue converter, a couple of programs I carry on my palmtop, and a strong stomach. Well, I can fake the stomach: just tell myself I'm peeling spuds, sticking bits of wire in Mr. Potato Head, triggering ghost echoes in a decaying neural network, feeding something arcane. Howe pushes in and insists on copying what I do; it's annoying at first, but monkey-see monkey-do gets results and between us we make short work of the sack. A couple of the hands are washouts but in twenty minutes flat I've got a shrunken bag and a row of ghastly trophies arranged on the guardroom table.