Charles Stross - The Atrocity Archives

"Here," I say. Scary Spice-who has been shuffling nervously and keeping one eye on the airlock door-jumps.

"What's up?"

Howe watches with silent interest.

I hold up a hand. "Look." Thank Cthulhu for pocket soldering irons: the fingertips ignite neatly, that crypt-glow dancing around them.

Scary Spice looks confused. "Where are you? What's up?" His eyeballs are sliding around like greased marbles; he instinctively raises his gun.

"Safe that!" snaps Howe. He winks in my general direction.

"Hold out your left hand, Scary," I say.

"Okay." He shuts his eyes; I shove the stump of the hand into his glove. "What the fuck is this?"

I blink and try to focus on him, but he's slipping away. It's weird; I try to track him but my eyes refuse to lock on. "What you're holding is called a Hand of Glory. While you're holding it, nobody can see you-it works on the possessors outside, too, or I wouldn't be here."

"Uh, yeah. How long's it good for?"

"How the fuck should I know?" I reply. I glance at Howe.

"Put it down now ," he says. A hand appears on the table and I find I can focus on Scary again. Howe glances at me. "This is a bloody miracle," he says morosely. "Pity we didn't have it a couple of years ago in Azerbaijan." He keys his mike: "Howe to all, we've got a ticket home. Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, everyone downstairs now. Captain, you're going to want to see this too."

IT'S LIKE BEING AT SCHOOL AGAIN, SITTING ONE fucking exam after another, sure that if you don't finish the question in the set time it's going to screw your life. This exam, the fail grade is anything short of 100 percent and you get the certificate, with no appeal possible, milliseconds after you put your pen down.

I'm crouching in the basement with Alan and a thing that looks like a steel dustbin on a handcart, if steel dustbins came painted green and neatly labelled THIS WAY UP and DO NOT DROP. I will confess that I'm sweating like a pig, even in the frigid air of the redoubt, because we are now down to about fifteen minutes and if this fails we won't have time to reach the gate.

"Take five," says Alan. "You're doing really well, Bob. I mean that. You're doing really well."

"I bet you say that to all the boys," I mutter, turning the badly photocopied page of arming instructions-the pamphlet that comes with the bomb has a blue cardboard cover, like a school exercise book that's been classified top secret by mistake.

"No, really." Alan leans back against the wall. "They got away, Bob. Everyone but us. Maybe you don't think that's a big deal, but they do; they'll remember it for the rest of their lives, and even if we don't follow them they'll be drinking a toast to your memory for a long time to come."

"That's reassuring." I flip another page. I didn't know H-bombs came with user manuals and cutaway diagrams, exploded views of the initiator core. "Look, this is where the pit goes, right?" I point at the page and then at a spot about five centimetres above the base of the dustbin.

"No." Alan moves my hand right up to the top of the bomb casing. "You've got it upside down."

"Well, that's a relief," I say lightly.

"At least, I think it's upside down," he says in a worried tone of voice.

"Uh-huh." I move my finger over the diagram. "Now this is where the detonation controller goes, right?"

"Yes, that's right," he says, much more reassuringly. I give the green dustbin a hard glance.

Atom bombs aren't that complicated. Back in the late 1970s an American high school physics teacher got together with his class. They designed and built an A-bomb. The US Navy thanked them, trucked it away, added the necessary plutonium, and detonated it down on the test range. The hard bit about building an A-bomb is the plutonium, which takes a specialised nuclear reactor and a chemical reprocessing plant to manufacture and which tends to be kept behind high barbed-wire fences patrolled by guys with guns.

However, atom bombs do have one interesting trait: they go "bang" when you squeeze a sphere of plutonium using precisely detonated explosive lenses. Conventional explosives. And if those lenses don't detonate in exactly the right sequence, if you scramble them, you may get a fizzle, but you don't get a firework. It's like an egg, with a yolk (the A-bomb detonator) and a white (the fusion spark plug and other bang-amplifying widgets) inside it.

So here I am, sitting next to a rogue H-bomb with fourteen minutes to run on its clock; and when Alan passes me a magic marker I draw a big fat X on its casing, because I intend to do to this bomb exactly what Brains did to his eggs-scramble it without breaking the shell.

"How many lenses in this model?"

"Twenty. Dodecahedral layout, triangular sections. Each of 'em is a slab of RDX with a concave centre and a berylide-alloy facing pointing inward."

"Gotcha." More chalk marks. RDX is mondo nasty high explosive; its detonation speed is measured in kilometres per second. When they blow, those explosive lenses will punch the beryllium-alloy sheet inward onto a suspended sphere of plutonium about the size of a large grapefruit or a small melon. If you blow them all within a microsecond or so, the shock wave closes around the metallic core like a giant fist, and squeezes. If they go off asymmetrically, instead of squeezing the plutonium until it goes bang, they squirt it harmlessly out the side. Well, harmlessly unless you're standing nearby. A slug of white-hot supercritical plutonium barreling out of a ruptured bomb casing at several hundred metres per second is not exactly fun for all the family. "That puts the top half of the hemisphere about-here."

"Very good. What now?"

"Fetch a chair and some books or boxes or something." I pick up the basilisk gun and begin fiddling with it. "I need to align this on the hemisphere and tape it in position."

When the beryllium-alloy sphere assembles it squishes the plutonium pit inward. Plutonium is about twice as dense as lead, and fairly soft; it's a metal, warm to the touch from alpha particle decay, and it exhibits some of the weirdest heavy-metal chemistry known to science. It exists in half a dozen crystalline forms between zero and one hundred Celsius; what it gets up to inside an imploding nuclear core is anybody's guess.

"Chair."

"Duct tape."

"What next?"

"Get me a cordless drill, a half-inch bit, and a pair of scissors."

At the core of the grapefruit there's a hollow space, and inside the hollow there's a pea-sized lump of weirdly shaped metal alloy, the design of which is a closely guarded secret. When the molten-hot compressed plutonium hits it, it vomits neutrons. And the neutrons in turn start a cascade reaction inside the plutonium; every time a plutonium nucleus is hit by a neutron it wobbles like jelly, splits in two, and emits a bunch more neutrons and a blast of gamma radiation. This happens in a unit of time called a "shake"-about a tenth of a thousandth of a millionth of a second-and every plutonium nucleus in the core will have been blasted into fragments within fifty shakes of the core shockwave hitting the initiator and triggering that initial neutron burst. ( If it collapses symmetrically.) And maybe a few milliseconds later the devil will be free to dance in our universe.

Twelve minutes to go. I position the chair in front of the bomb. The back of the chair is made of plywood-a real win-so I drill holes in it at the right separation, then get Alan to hold the basilisk box while I chop strips of duct tape off the reel and bind it to the chair immediately in front of the X where I think the explosive lenses lie.

"Bingo." One chair. One basilisk gun-a box with a camcorder to either side-taped to the back of the chair. One ticking hydrogen bomb. The back of my neck itches, as if already feeling the flash of X-rays ripped from the bleeding plasma of the bomb's casing when the pit disassembles in a few scant shakes of Teller's alarm clock. "I'm powering up the gun now." The gun's sensors face the bomb through the holes I've drilled in the chair's back. I switch it on and watch the charge indicator. Damn, the cold doesn't seem to have done the batteries any good. It's still live, but close to the red RECHARGE zone.