Authors: Charles Stross
“Nowhere, yet.” You sit down at the desk and unfold your machine’s display. It’s chunky and old-fashioned but vastly faster than your phone and glasses: You log on to the hotel’s network, bounce into Zonespace using the passwords Russell gave you, and proceed to take your bear for a romp around the tourist sites. “I suggest…go get your stuff from your room, anything you may want later, as if you’re checking out: I’m going to make damn sure Team Red know where I am. Alright?”
“Got it.” She studies your screen, which is repeating the display on your glasses. “That’s not Avalon Four. Where are you?”
“On the high plateau of Leng. That’s where the Pabodie expedition came adrift: There should be some Old Ones hereabouts if the rampaging hordes of Antarctic explorers haven’t been through since they last reset the shard. They’re guarding some loot I need to get my hands on.” About a quarter of a million lines of source code, squirreled away among the skeletons and treasures guarded by a fearsomely large shoggoth; if you want to keep some data secure, there’s nothing quite like sticking it in a record in a holographic distributed database that’s guarded by Lovecraftian horrors. And it’s not as if you took the intellectual property with you when you left LupuSoft, is it? This is just a backup copy, buried in one of their own databases. One that it’s just possible for a random stranger to get his hands on if he knows
exactly
where the body’s buried and the correct ritual for digging it up.
“Riiiight.” She sounds sceptical. “So, let’s see. You’re deliberately drawing attention to yourself, and getting your hands on something you stashed earlier. And you want me to grab my bags. What exactly are you planning on doing?”
You stretch your arms above your head, lace your fingers together, and yawn widely. “I want to look like I’m the bait in Barry’s trap that he asked for. Do you trust the police?”
“I trust Inspector Kavanaugh to find your niece, that’s about it.” You give her a long look.
Should have expected her to say something like that
. Lowering your arms: “Why?”
“Just asking. Barry wants us to flush someone out of the woodwork. A distraction, probably—some nuisance to attract the cops’ attention, something they can’t ignore. When that happens, we can expect things to get hot. Question is, do we duck and run when that happens? Or do we stay here?”
“It depends. What do you mean by hot?” The ferret is back: She’s not taken in by the line you fed Michaels. Well, you figure she’s in this with you, and she deserves to know.
“Barry’s wrong.”
“Wrong about…?”
“He thinks this is a game of spooks, that he’s up against the Guoanbu, who are professionals. He figures that when he rolls up their network and serves the ASBO, they’ll just pack up their kit and go home.” (The hoard is just around the corner of this icicle-lined tunnel into hell, once you sweet-talk its guardian into going to sleep and letting you through. So you hit the
PAUSE
key.) “He’s as wrong as a very wrong noob can be. We’re not playing against the Guoanbu, we’re playing against
Team Red
. They’re a gaming clan, and by all the evidence a fucking hot one, and they’ve got the technical backup from hell. The Chinese gamers, they’re vicious. I’ve gone up against those fluffy bunnies before, and they play for keeps and they co-ordinate really well. And they, they don’t really
believe
we
exist
. We’re pale ghosts, trapped on the other side of a screen for their amusement. They’re going to grief us hard, and if they’ve got access to the sort of kit Barry’s talking about, they could have done all sorts of…stuff.”
It’s more than a decade since a bunch of crackers—who nobody ever identified—managed to sneak password and credit card sniffers onto the core Cisco routers at MAE-East; things have gotten far worse since then, in the covert war of sysadmin on hacker that the public don’t get to hear about. Entire telco companies have been compromised with no one the wiser until months afterwards. The public, with their wee fingerprint-authorized smart cards to supply them with the response to their e-commerce challenges, don’t really have a clue what’s going on. And there are much worse things a black hat troupe on a capture-the-flag rampage can do these days than just grabbing passwords and borking hospital networks. Lots of critical engineering systems rely on encrypted tunnels running over the Internet, lots of SCADA systems and worse—remote medical telemetry (“but you said you wanted your blood test results analysing as fast as possible!”), stock-market transactions, civil airliner flight plans, and exercise program updates to coffin dodgers’ programmable pace-makers. The spooks in Guoanbu probably
are
professional, they wouldn’t mess with the European SCADA infrastructure short of an outright shooting war…but are they likely to realize that they’ve almost certainly been pwn3d by their own pet griefer clan, and all their electronic armoured divisions are in the hands of a dozen Asperger’s cases with attention-deficit disorder and a quantum magic wand?
It’s not a risk you can take. And it’s not a risk you can explain to Barry Michaels, because you know his type, and after seventy years of data processing, they
still
think that coders can be hired and fired; that the engineers who ripped out the muscles and nerves of the modern world and replaced it with something entirely alien under the skin are still little artisans who will put their tools down and go home if you tell them to leave the job half-done.
You’re half-worried that Elaine will make a big deal of it, but instead she nods quickly, walks up behind your chair, and pecks you on top of the head. “Don’t go ’way,” she says, then backs out of the room in a hurry. You find yourself staring after her with a warm interior glow of confusion to keep you company: The idea that you might
go away
while she’s counting on you being here is just plain bizarre.
You dive back into the tunnel into the mountains of madness. It’s icy cold and very dark except where your head-mounted lamp is pointing, and the walls are covered with intricate hieroglyphs beneath their thin layer of rime. The floor is uneven and worn, and you shuffle forward slowly, sniffing suspiciously. The Guardian of the Depths lives hereabouts, but frequently sorties from its chamber of horrors to patrol the upper levels. You can’t hear the faint leathery susurration of its progress as it worms its way around the Antarctic catacombs like a vast, malignant slug, but that doesn’t mean you’re safe: It’s smart enough to lurk in ambush if it hears an unwary human or ursinoid.
In this Zone shard, you’ve tooled up to the tech limit—the blunderbuss has given way to a monstrous Steyr IWS-2000, and you’ve got an RPG-30 slung over your shoulder in case the Anti-Materiel Rifle fails to dent the Guardian’s hide—but you’re unlikely to triumph by force of arms in Lovecraftland. In fact, just tiptoeing around here on your own would be suicidally foolhardy if you didn’t have a couple of very unfair safewords up your sleeve.
You shuffle along the passageway. A T-junction looms out of the gloom in front of you, empty twin dark tunnels mocking you like vacant eye-sockets. You grunt and shine your torch down the left-hand branch, consulting the map you summoned from the vasty deeps of your phone’s memory earlier (carefully misspelled and misfiled to throw the inevitable googlebots off, lest some gameco crawler stumble across it in the public search indices and flag this complex as spoilered). There should be a landmark around here—
Aha!
Landmark 192
humps up out of the frosty trail on the floor. The unfortunate explorer is curled foetally in his sealskin parka, facing the wall as if in his last moments he imagined that hiding his face from the crawling horror might save him. Which means you’re about ten metres away from the oubliette. You rise to your knees and lope forward until the darkness gives back a greater shadow, the round mouth of the Guardian’s cavern.
Summoning your words of power—and shouldering the IWS-2000—you step in front of the black pit of despair. The Guardian, as your torch beam rapidly informs you, is
OUT
: Therefore you get to play another day. (There are two ways around the Guardian: admin mode, or a ten-kiloton tacnuke. And unfortunately Lovecraftland is owned by your former employers and they didn’t give you either of the magic keys when they showed you the door.) So you step down the weirdly reticulated snail’s-tongue slope that leads into the conical pit, paying no attention to the eldritch bioluminescent glow from the ceiling or the piles of bones and other debris that line the floor of the huge space, and lope across to the irregular, pentagonal altar at the far side of the dungeon. Ten more seconds, and you’ll have your buried loot—
Bamf.
Oh bugger,
you think, as no less than four glowing indigo holes appear in the air, occupying an arc between you and the altar.
Someone got creative
…
You flick the safety off and shoulder the AMR, aiming at the first eerie shape as it begins to take on humanoid form. In the real world, only a complete lunatic would fire the IWS-2000 from the shoulder or in a confined space—it’s a crew-served weapon—but when you’re a quarter-ton bull ursus, reality gets to take a back seat; besides, you’ve got the musculature and bone structure to take the recoil at least once.
Darkness grins at you and takes a step forward as you squeeze the trigger.
Things get a little confusing at this point, because you’ve run up against one of the limits of Zonespace: the lack of haptic feedback. But when the view stops jittering and clipping, you realize that the recoil has flung you all the way back to the altar, and the thing you shot at isn’t there anymore—spooks and shades may be nasty enough for normal adventurers, but they’re not up to stopping twenty grams of armour-piercing fin-stabilized discarding sabot love missile when it comes knocking at fifteen hundred metres per second. You track on the second shade as it raises its arms and does the zombie-lurch towards you, and pull the trigger again. This time you see what happens as the hypersonic shock wave turns the bogeyman into a humanoid smokering, but your vision flickers red, and you notice that you’re down 30 per cent on your stamina. Which is not good at all as bogey three looms closer, baring teeth that stretch and waver like a mirage—
Another round, and another palpable hit. But your vision’s reddening, now and you see you’re down to 50 per cent:
What the fuck?
You think, then blink up the medical chart and realize to your horror that it’s the AMR: You’re turning your own shoulder into ground hamburger with the recoil. Which is pants—in the real world the AMR just has a kick like a mule, that’s what the shock absorbers and the muzzle brake are for—but the Zone weapons committee clearly got it wrong, and you’re stuck taking damage from your own gun like you’re a seventy-kilo noob or something.
There’s no time to switch to a different weapon—bogey four is crouching in readiness for a cavern-crossing leap, its claws and fangs lengthening—so you grit your teeth and aim, squeezing off another shot. The magazine’s down to one round, but bogey four disintegrates in mid-air. There’s a crash and a cloud of dust and icy gravel showers down from the roof, almost blocking the doorway, and your stamina read-out begins to flash: At 20 per cent you’re in big trouble, medevac territory in a guild scenario, but there are no healers around right now.
Never mind
…
You put the anti-tank rifle down and turn around. The ghastly altar is still there. It’s made of pale granite, and it seems to throb slightly as you look at it, as if it’s on the verge of turning inside out like a Necker cube: The hieroglyphs are as alien and incomprehensible as ever, but somehow horrible, bringing to mind echoes of alien anatomy, organs ripped from the abdominal cavities of human sacrifices, and other, hidden things. “Great,” you mutter. “Attention, object able charlie sixteen. This is your creator speaking. Give me a cookie and initiate debug mode.”
The altar flashes emerald and turns inside out, injecting the stolen hoard straight into your character’s inventory. And you’re tooled up! Now let the games begin.
After the briefing, Liz held you back for a couple of extra minutes. “I met your nerd and librarian this morning,” she says. “You didn’t tell me they were a couple.”
“You—” You blink. “What makes you think that?”
“Well, Sergeant, only the fact that she’s wearing his spare trousers. And Bob Lockhart picked them both up at Mr. Reed’s address. It does tend to complicate things, doesn’t it?”
You blink again. “Christ, skipper, that’s news to me.” You try to square the memory with how they’d acted earlier: not a sniff of any office hanky-panky, that was for sure, not that it’s any of your business what they get up to in their spare time. “I didnae get any sign of it earlier.”
“Well, they’re working for Michaels now, I am informed. That’s where this shitstorm is blowing in from.” She gives you an odd look. “When CopSpace comes back up, call me before you look up Mr. Reed’s previous, Sue. It’s misleading.”
Huh?
“Okay.” You look around. Everyone else has already left the briefing room, off to their various tasks. “What do you want me to do now?”
“I want you to get yourself over to the West End Malmaison hotel and find them as soon as they show up. Then stick to them like glue. That clown Michaels is up to something, and while everyone else is running around looking for terrorists under the bed, I want someone competent—you—on the spot.”
“You think Jack and Elaine are going to piss on our patch, skipper?” You don’t bother to hide your scepticism.
“No, Sue, I think they’re very likely the target!” And she doesn’t bother to hide her urgency either.
“But I haven’t done the course—”
“You think I don’t already
know
that? Jesus, Sue, we’re at full stretch here; do you think I’d put you on protection duty if I had someone qualified? If you need advice, call me. Now get moving.”
You’ve never seen Liz that close to losing her rag, and it’s not a pretty sight—especially when you’re on the receiving end of it. She must be close to doing her nut. “Reet! Right! I get the picture! I’m off.”
“Take Bob with you, he needs the education!” she calls as she strides off towards the incident control room.
That’s you telled off. You’re about to IM Bob when you remember: TETRA’s been pwn3d. So you ask yourself,
If I were Bob, where would I be right now? Ah,
that’s
where.
And you head down to the back yard.
Mary badgered you unconscionably until you gave up the habit a year or two ago, but Bob’s still young and unencumbered by health insurance worries. And he is indeed having a furtive fag out round the bike rack. “Bob. Got yourself a cheap mobie? Then send me your number.”
“My number—” He twitches nervously. “Really? You want my number?”
“Bob. Bob.” You lean closer. Technically, smoking isn’t allowed anywhere on the station, even outdoors in the car-park, but nobody in their right mind’s going to push the button that suspends half the force and leaves the other half pulling double shifts, as long as the tobacco junkies are prudent enough to keep their filthy habit out of the public gaze. “I’m your sergeant, Bob. Which means I need to be able to contact you at all times. Are you with me?”
Bob nods reluctantly.
“And you got the message to buy yourself a prepay mobie this morning, like everyone else. And now I want your number. Yes? So show me.”
He glances around anxiously. “Promise you won’t tell anyone?” He stubs the fag out on the underside of his size twelve and pulls the phone out. It’s pink and has frilly unicorns frolicking on it.
You take a moment to get your coughing fit under control. “Whae did ye get
that
?” you splutter.
“It was all they had left, Sarge, honest—it was in Toys “R” Us, see? Because all the big phone shops had already sold out.” You roll your eyes: He’s right, now you think about it—it’s not going to be just the Polis who’re tooling up with prepays for today’s big switch-over. He looks mortified as he punches up his pin number and shows it to you. (The display has little explodey pink love-hearts, twinkling and falling to either side of the multi-coloured numbers.)
“Aw, Jesus.” You haul your own playground special out—it’s a big boy’s model, black and chunky with yellow chevrons—and pair it with his. “You poor bastard.”
“It was down to either My Little Unicorn or the Hello Kittie Ballerina Special when I got there,” he confesses.
“Just put the bloody thing away, before anyone sees it!” He obeys with alacrity. Look on the bright side, if you get called to deal with any hypo diabetics, he’s got
just
the right thing. “Has Inspector Mac given you anything to be doing today? Or just the general…?”
“Me? Nothing, Sarge. Why?”
“Just checking. Alright, you’re assigned to me today—by Inspector Kavanaugh. Yeah, I know she’s not in your line, but you’ve met Mr. Reed and Ms. Barnaby this morning, I gather? Our job’s to stick to them like glue today. They haven’t done anything, but the skipper figures they’re trouble magnets, and with the upcoming disruption, she wants humans in contact all the way.”
“Wow.” His eyes go wide. “I haven’t done the protection duty course, Sarge.”
“Between you and me, neither have I,” you confide. “But we know the targets, and we’ve got our orders, so we’re going to have to wing it.” So much for ISO9000-certified policing. You head for the door to see where your driver’s gotten to. “Come on, I’ll tell you what we’re supposed to be doing on the way.”
Traffic is heavy out on Corstorphine Road, and the van’s full of irritated constables fiddling clumsily with their unfamiliar mobies, swapping numbers and muttering voice dialling tags. Even though CopSpace is going down in a couple of hours, and they’ve been ordered in the most fearsome terms to keep their fingers out of the files, most of them are still wearing their goggles: an old protective reflex, tinted windows to keep the compromised world at bay. You’re an old enough sweat to remember a time before policing was something you did through augmented reality—a time when it wasnae just stumbling-down drunks who were dumb enough to swear at cops—and you’re not looking forward to today’s fun and games. It’ll be okay if they get CopSpace rebooted before chucking-out time, but the Council’s going through one of its usual barkingly stupid attempts to get all the pubs to close simultaneously on the stroke of half past midnight, and you’re not looking forward to Friday night once the local pissheads realize that the cops’ liferecorders aren’t running, and the cameras overhead are unmanned. It’ll be extra pepper spray and tasers all round, with double paperwork on the morrow when you go to explain the festivities to the hard-faced sheriff sitting in court: like a throwback to the nineties.
The van pulls in opposite the hotel, and you hop out. Bob bumbles along after you like an obedient puppy. You head for the front desk, where the polished-looking receptionists are handling the morning’s fall-out of crumblies—the problem cases who’re too old to cope with the automated checkout, or whose requirements don’t fall in one of the neat boxes in the business work flow. You slide deftly round the shambling sequential headache and slot yourself in at the end of the desk. Finally, one of the receptionists finishes processing a coffin dodger and comes over to get you off her plate before you lower the tone of her lobby. “Can I help?”
“Yes.” You smile politely. “I’m looking for one of your residents, a Ms. Barnaby. I believe she’s leasing an office suite from you? Dietrich-Brunner Associates?”
She looks at you as if you’re something that’s died under her nose. “Is there a problem?”
It’s time to tighten the smile and go a little glassy-eyed. “No problem. But I need to see Ms. Barnaby immediately. Police business.”
The two magic words finally sink in: You can almost hear the gears and cam-shafts engage in her head. “Oh, in that case…” She bends over her terminal. “Room 402, second floor, the lifts are over to your left. She was in there a minute ago.” Then she turns to the next tourist. “Can I help you?”
You can tell when you’re not wanted. “C’mon,” you mutter to Bob. “Let’s go upstairs.”
It’s a plush wee hotel, to be sure; the lifts have indirect lighting and subtle forest scents, and when you go out onto the landing, you see a strip of glass running floor to ceiling embedded in one wall, overlooking the high street. Room 402 isn’t far off the landing, and you approach it cautiously. The door’s not locked, so you open it and barge on in, regardless.
Here’s Jack! Sitting at a table, playing some kind of game. You glance over his shoulder at the big, unfolded screens of his laptop: some kind of cavern, luminous green text marching across the left-hand screen. “Mr. Reed,” you say, quite loudly, and he jumps and spins round, wincing as he nearly pulls his headphones out of their wired socket.
“You!” he says, for all the world like one of the villains in those cheesy Saturday-morning cartoons Davey keeps downloading. For a moment you think he’s about to freak on you, but he’s looking past your shoulder, with his face slowly crinkling with worry. “What’s up?”
“Nothing’s up—” you begin, but someone behind you is speaking: the librarian, Barnaby.
“Someone’s been in my room,” she says, angrily. “And it wasn’t room service. They don’t make up the rooms until after check-out.”
You turn round. She’s wearing jeans and a leather jacket and that’s an expensive kit-bag she’s got there. Something long is poking out of it, a black bin-liner wrapped around one end—a hockey stick, maybe? “Ah, Ms. Barnaby. I was looking for you both. Inspector Kavanaugh says—”
She raises a hand. “Don’t tell me, she wants you to stick to us like glue. Right?”
“Reet.” You stare at her hard. “You planning to be a nuisance? Or know somebody else who is?”
She meets your eyes. “I’m planning on doing what I’ve been told to do, Sergeant.” She puts the bag down. “I haven’t been told to expect you.” She stonewalls like a defence solicitor: You snort and turn aside.
Behind you, Bob clears his throat. “Sergeant?”
Jack is hammering away at the keyboard, typing like a mad thing in a pop-up window while the game he’s in unrolls in real time behind it. “What is it, Bob?”
Barnaby’s phone trills for attention: She turns away. Bob shuffles uneasily. “I think you’d better come and see for yourself, boss.”
You follow him out onto the landing outside the room. Bob points out the strip of floor-to-ceiling window. “Look.”
You stare out onto the high street. It’s the usual congested mess of buses and taxis queuing for Haymarket Interchange, with a couple of supertrams parked nose-to-tail and gumming everything up. Things have never been right there since they installed the light rail system, but nobody on the Council’s about to admit that they should have knocked down about a billion euros’ worth of historic listed buildings before they built the bloody tracks. It looks like pedestrian hell down there, even without the shambling crowd of people getting off the trams, moving oddly.
“What am I meant to be looking for, Bob?” you ask, forcing yourself to be patient.
“Zombies, skipper. What do they look like to you?”
You stare, wishing you could use your goggles—the digital zoom would be right handy at this point. It looks like any other crowd to you, at first, so you squint and look at the edges. They’re walking funny, lurching from side to side. And why has that guy got his arms outstretched? He blunders about, colliding with a woman in a business suit that’s ripped from shoulder to sleeve, and her face—
“Jesus, Bob.” You blink, then swallow. “There’s no such thing as zombies.” A little niggling doubt worries away at you. “But get yerself down to reception and tell them to shut the doors, just in case. I’m going to make some calls.”
You pull your phone out and speed-dial Liz. There’s no wait, just an immediate canned message. “Hello, you are through to Detective Inspector Kavanaugh’s voice mail. Please leave a message.”
Shit. Why’s her phone switched off?
You glance out of the window again, just to confirm what you can see. “Skipper, Sue here. Ye dinna have tae take ma wuird fer it, I’ll text you a photie”—you pause, trying to get a grip on your accent, which is making a bid for freedom (as it often does in moments of stress)—“but we’re holed up in the Malmaison and there’s a bunch of zombies on the pavement outside.” You swallow. “Whit should I do?” You end the call, then take a couple of snaps of the shambling horde and send them to Liz’s mailbox. It’s probably one of those old-time flash mobs, but why here, why now, and why zombies?
You go back into the conference room just as Elaine, nodding furiously at no one in particular, ends
her
call and glances at you. “Sorry I was rude earlier, Sergeant. Nobody told me to expect you.”
“Reet.” You shake your head. “What’re you doing?”
“Being bait.” She swings an office chair round and sits down on it, facing you. “Actually, Jack’s the bait, I’m supposed to co-ordinate the response.”
Bait? Response?
“Bait for who?” you ask cautiously.
“A bunch of gamers in China.” She sniffs. “They’re all over our critical infrastructure, but they made a few mistakes, and now Jack’s wearing a false identity—Nigel MacDonald, the guy you’ve been looking for—and
we
”—her emphasis on the last word is extremely odd—“expect the bad guys to expose themselves, trying to locate him so they can shut him up. They don’t know MacDonald is a sock-puppet, you see.”
“And you are…?”
Scrabbling for traction
, springs to mind.
“I’m secret agent X, it seems.” She grimaces. “Thing is, we don’t know how they’re going to try to get at Jack, but he’s raising a fuss to make them pay attention—”
“Got it,” says the man himself, still hunched over his gaming box. There’s a pause in his incessant typing.
“Got what?” you and Elaine ask, almost simultaneously.
“What they’re fucking doing,” says Jack, triumphantly. “At least, I
think
I know what they’re doing.”
“What are they doing, Jack?” asks Elaine. She’s flexing her hands unconsciously, so that for a moment you think she’s fantasizing about strangling him.