The Nightmare Stacks: A Laundry Files novel (33 page)

“Right. I should have known. Stupid question. Did you bring anything else?”

“Will this do?” she asks, raising the baton that’s part of her costume, left-handed. She barely waves it: he can feel ripples of static raise the hair on his arms as it parts the air.

“I’d better take the knife, I don’t know how to use that.” She hands him the dagger wordlessly. Alex takes it, feeling as light as a feather and sick with a fear he can control as long as he doesn’t think about it too hard.
Bottom level. Big corridor. Sentry guns.
“Let’s do this.” He tenses and opens up his consciousness, feeling a sense he can’t quite articulate as he visualizes a blazing five-dimensional fiery knotwork revolving inside his head, fractal gears revolving within skeletal Möbius loops —

His superspeed kicks in and everything around him seems to slow down. The light reddens and dims, and the air thickens to the consistency of water as he sprints towards the other end of the corridor.

He spins round, presenting his back to the wooden door for impact, sees Cassie’s mouth slowly open, her eyes widen as she meets his gaze. Everything is very cold and as he draws strength from his V-parasites he hears a mindless chittering sound, as of a million mandibles nibbling at the paper-thin walls of reality. His back hits the door and the wood splinters and shatters, exploding away from him as he finishes his turn: but all he feels is the gnawing maddening hunger in his soul, the hunger of a black hole that seeks to destroy everything he touches. His feet fly out from under him and he skids across the cement floor and out over the first flight of steps, bounces off the opposite wall of the shaft, then begins to fall.

Cassie is running after, but although she’s fast she doesn’t have his PHANG mojo – or magi power, as she’d put it. She flies down the steps moonwalk-slow, taking them three at a time with her mace held before her. Its tip is glowing violet. He hits the middle floor landing, absorbs the impact with his toes, and gently kicks off, aiming himself at the next flight of steps. His shoes leaving a black rubber slug-trail on the concrete, gently smoking.

Then he sees the writhing luminescence of eaters on the loose beyond the exit from the shaft, and realizes he might have bitten into something too big to bleed.

A wave of blue-eyed equine horror floods across the Yorkshire Dales, but the only human eyes that witness the progress of the Host of Air and Darkness are dead.

The armored column rides six abreast, their ranks stretching back for kilometers behind the spearhead. A cloud of dust and debris roils in the air above them and the earth drums beneath their clawed feet. But the riders who make up the column are curiously hard to see. The unaided and unprotected human eyeball naturally slides past the riders, interpolating less disturbing images: an out of place freight train thundering along a track where no rail runs, perhaps.

To the fore, and spaced to either side of the column at regular intervals, ride the magi in their closed carriages. The sun is still below the horizon, and the magi have windows of subtle crystal through which they maintain watch. They watch the land unroll to either side, and whenever they see an observer they sink ghostly fangs of necromantic venom into the witness’s visual cortex. As the column pounds across a B road, a milk tanker returning from an early farm run rounds a curve. The driver blinks, bleary-eyed, and begins to brake: by the time his vehicle has rolled to a halt he slumps dead at the wheel, eye sockets bleeding and empty around the withered stumps of his optic nerves.

There aren’t many casualties at first. A few farm workers, up and about in the early hours. Trucks on their way to make deliveries, cars driven by those unlucky enough to have Sunday morning jobs. They screech and skid, spinning and shedding bumpers and metal when they rebound from the drystone walls lining the roads, drivers already dead. But as the column pounds onwards across the countryside, the death toll begins to mount. They die by handfuls at first, then by tens and scores and windrows.

The Host’s route bypasses the urban sprawl of the
urük
for the most part, which is a small mercy. They pound across open country until, south of Rylstone, they pick up the Grassington Road. The two metaled lanes provide fine footing for the Host, although it is here that they receive their first injuries: two of the front rank of cavalry troopers are unable to dodge the skidding Hovis Bakery truck that jackknifes side-on across their path as its driver convulses and dies. Their mounts roar angrily, struggling on rapidly healing broken legs, but the riders are less lucky: no amount of armor will save one of the People from a hundred-kilometer-per-hour collision with a Volvo engine block.

As the road bends towards Skipton and the ugly stone hovels grow more frequent, the Host leaves the metaled surface and races across the nearby golf course, bypassing the center of the small market town. At half past six, a couple of kilometers east of Skipton, the armored column encounters the A65. And now the slaughter begins in earnest.

The A65 started life as an eighteenth-century turnpike, but today it is a fast, two-lane-wide main road, running northwest from Leeds to the Yorkshire Dales. In the near-dawn on a Sunday morning it is not heavily trafficked, but nobody has explained the
urük
traffic laws to the Host’s marshals. Consequently, the first encounter with a Range Rover barreling along at a cheerfully excessive hundred and twenty kilometers per hour comes as a nasty surprise to the front rank. Angry remonstrations are exchanged; nearing the crest of a hill the column bunches and pauses, and then regroups to continue its march behind a screen of fire magi, their incendiary gaze at full alert.

The drivers of the next fifty-eight vehicles die so suddenly that nobody has any time to raise the alarm. Their bodies are so badly burned that in the aftermath they are only identifiable by dental impressions. Less fortunately, two of the vehicles in question are buses, and this is the point at which the death toll from the incursion rises into triple figures.

There are other side effects: traffic cameras and CCTV installations burst into flames, as do the curbside boxes of any networks carrying data from cameras pointing in the general direction of the Host. The strike force contains specialists equipped with battlefield countermeasures that target observation mechanisms and the brains of watchers alike.

Two hours after leaving Malham Cove, the predawn glow of the rising sun finds the Host of Air and Darkness nearly a hundred kilometers away, bypassing Burley-in-Wharfedale and rumbling through Otley town center, then on towards the outskirts of Leeds. With a population of over fourteen thousand, Otley is the biggest
urük
habitat that the Host has encountered thus far. The troopers make no attempt to hunt down and kill the feral serfs that live here, but they rely now on force rather than camouflage: the death toll rises rapidly as early morning
urük
witnesses fall to the ground, their heads wreathed in sparking purple flames, bodies twitching and convulsing.

There is a little screaming. (But only a little, for death comes fast.)

The Host’s path skirts the runway of Leeds-Bradford International Airport. Unfortunately the departure path of this morning’s outbound flights crosses the A65, and most aircraft will not have had time to climb above a thousand meters before they cross the road. So it is that Thomson Flight 3748 to Tenerife has the supreme bad luck to be on the runway and accelerating for takeoff as the Host approaches. It’s a charter flight but demand has been very slack lately, and today it is little more than a third full, with seventy-six souls on board. There are two pilots, four cabin crew, and seventy passengers: most of them families with young children, on their way to a cheap holiday destination during the Easter school vacation.

The Host’s main air defense detachment is far to the rear, emplaced on the heights above Malham to await the reaction to Highest Liege’s decoy gambit. Nor are the dragons of the Close Air Support section available right now. The battle magi have never seen a Boeing 737-800 before, and have little idea of what it is capable of, or indeed what it is. But as it hurtles roaring towards them and rotates for takeoff over the heads of the armored column, they recognize it as a threat.

Helmets snap round as the blue-and-white behemoth hurtles towards the Host, climbing into the air above them. Glaring bright lamps embedded at the roots of its wings cast an uncanny glare; metallic eggs clutched beneath its eerily paralyzed wings howl mournfully. But there is no panic in the file. Knights bearing portable air defense weapons turn in their saddles and raise their nightmares to eye level, bringing them to bear on the approaching target.

There is a flash of green light, far brighter than the rising sun. A tiny fraction of the carbon nuclei in the exposed non-metallic surfaces of the plane have been converted into silicon nuclei. The resultant ionization cascade dumps huge amounts of energy into bodily tissues and plastic or rubber. The composite radome forming the airliner’s nose flares briefly and burns away: the heads of the captain and first officer explode simultaneously. Further aft, the backwash of the basilisk strike ignites the tires of the extended undercarriage, and a flare of flaming debris wreathes the central fuel tank and wings in a sheath of glowing plasma. The airliner wobbles above the heads of the Host, and for a few seconds it seems as if it may fly onward. But then the port wing dips slightly and, at low speed and with no corrective hand on the controls, the wing stalls. The airliner side-slips and noses down onto the outskirts of Otley.

Even at three kilometers’ range, the impact of an airliner loaded with thirty tons of Jet-A makes a ground-shaking impact.

Airline travel is remarkably safe in the twenty-first century: TOM-3748 is the first passenger jet airliner to crash anywhere in the world this month. But it won’t be the last or the largest to do so today.

The contrails of long-range airline traffic flash silver in the brightening predawn sky above the Yorkshire Dales.

The Dales lie roughly three hundred kilometers north and a hundred kilometers west of one corner of a sector containing the world’s busiest air traffic. The London/Paris/Amsterdam triangle is occupied by three of the world’s ten busiest airports, along with about a dozen smaller terminals. Transatlantic flights from Europe generally depart along a westerly heading, crossing the Bristol Channel or skirting the southern coast of Ireland. But there are other major international hubs to the south and east, and flights from these airports to destinations on the eastern seaboard of North America tend to fly northwest, directly across the British midlands.

Flight AZ-602 is an Alitalia Airbus 330 that took off from Rome’s Fiumicino Airport two hours and ten minutes earlier, starting the 7,000-kilometer daily trek to New York. As it cruises over England at 33,000 feet, the cabin crew are serving lunch to the 234 passengers on board. It is half an hour since TOM-3748 sent a smoke-streaked fireball a hundred meters into the sky above Otley, and emergency services from Leeds Bradford Airport in Yeadon are still battling the blaze. A major incident has been declared in the Yorkshire town which lies eighty kilometers to the east of AZ-602’s path, but reports on the ground are confused, with charred bodies and detonated cameras littering the high street. Two police cars are still burning in the center of town. There are no surviving witnesses, and the police superintendent who has been called in is baffled and angry as he tries to establish just what has happened in the early hours of Sunday morning, but the civil authorities do not yet suspect that the explosion of TOM-3748 is not an isolated incident.

Eighty kilometers away to the northeast, the Marne Barracks at Catterick – the British Army’s largest base – is buzzing like a hornet’s nest that’s been kicked. Soldiers are hastily collecting their kit and prepping light armored vehicles for an unexpected excursion. The approaches to the base are on lockdown and, shockingly, a reconnaissance company with its Scimitar light tanks and a Striker missile carrier has deployed with live ammunition to cover the west of the base. But nobody at Army GHQ has yet realized that the nation’s skies are under attack, much less notified the National Air Traffic Service or alerted the Royal Air Force’s Quick Reaction Force.

On the heights above Malham, the Host’s theater air defense crew watch the skies. It is a clear, bright day, with a frontal system moving in from the west, threatening rain by afternoon. It is dry, and the feather-edged contrail of AZ-602 is inching its way northwest across the dome of the sky.

We cannot know what the basilisk crew were thinking. (Subsequent events have rendered that question moot.) Certainly they could not possibly have mistaken the twin-engined Airbus for an enemy firewyrm, or indeed for any other variety of aerial predator from their devastated homeworld. On the other hand, Highest Liege of Airborne Strike had been most specific in her proposal, and with All-Highest’s endorsement the
geasa
of obedience that bind all the subjects of the Morningstar Empire in thrall lend her operational orders the force of law.

The air defense crew do not immediately fire on AZ-602. But they painstakingly pull down the saurian necks of their living weapons and double-check the attachment points of their blinkers. They irrigate the monstrous eye clusters cautiously, from well back behind their carefully dulled shields; then the targeting crew installs the newly hatched brain leeches that will direct and aim the basilisks. The watchers use their mage-glass to survey the skies: and presently they identify a second, additional target matching Highest Liege’s specifications.

American Airlines 759 is another Airbus 330, flying the 8,000-kilometer great circle from Athens to Philadelphia with 195 passengers and nine crew aboard. It has been airborne for nearly three and a quarter hours as it tracks northwest, thirty kilometers south of the Yorkshire Dales, a thousand feet higher than the Alitalia flight.

AZ-602 is already forty kilometers north of Malham Cove by this point, receding rapidly: it will be out of range of the heavy air defense basilisks within another five minutes. But with AA-759 coming into view from the south, there is plenty of time to line up the basilisks’ heads on both flying machines, and release the blinkers that restrain their lethal gaze.