The Nightmare Stacks: A Laundry Files novel (36 page)

“Tanks.” Lockhart closes his eyes for a moment. “I seem to remember a time when we kept Challengers at Catterick. None of this nonsense about centralizing everything in the home counties. Talk about keeping all the eggs in one basket…”

“Blame the 2010 defense review.” Jez looks away. “We need to be prepared to hold out for at least twelve hours.” They’ve already discussed – and discounted – any hope of help from the police and regular emergency services. The civil authorities will be too busy saving civilians. In any case, if Forecasting Ops are right about the scale of the threat barreling towards the center of Leeds the local Armed Response Units will be as much use as a wet rag in a nuclear firestorm. It’s hard to be certain, though: the threat seems to be invisible, insofar as eyeballs or cameras that see it simply stop reporting. Maybe when Pinky and his forlorn hope make contact there’ll be some more hard information, but until then all they’ve got is BBC News 24’s and Sky News 24’s rolling speculation on TV sets in one of the offices, plus the usual reliable fallbacks: Twitter and Facebook. The shocked voices of the TV newsreaders talking over the burning funeral pyres of airliners tell their own tale. The oppo have theater anti-airborne capability, which suggests something frightening about the scale of the attack; a squadron of helicopter gunships and a battalion of light armored vehicles certainly won’t be enough to stop them. “I’ve got most of the machine guns set up under the car park top deck, and OCCULUS Two should arrive before contact, but we don’t have enough people to defend the site against an effective assault force.” She takes a deep breath. “I changed my mind and I think you’re right about the cameras.”

“Tell the Highways Agency to lock down all the approach roads on the north and west of the city first,” Lockhart says curtly. “Set the signaling to red at the Armley Gyratory, down at Elland Road, and all around the outer ring road. Close down the inner ring road to stop anyone driving into the city center. A couple of hours of gridlock is a cheap price to pay if it keeps everyone off the roads.” He pauses. “And get the bloody railways stopped. The last thing we need is a couple of intercity expresses dumping a thousand passengers in the middle of a battle.”

The dawn light is beginning to cast a long shadow from the truncated tower at Bridgewater Place when Lockhart goes downstairs and returns to the makeshift operations room. If only they’d had another few months to get their feet under the table this might be a survivable situation, he thinks. The Laundry’s migration plan includes provisions to turn the regional continuity of government center in the nuclear bunker under Quarry Hill into a properly hardened defensible location. But they’re not ready yet. Expecting a skeleton staff to defend a barely prepared civilian office complex against a thuamaturgically equipped military force is madness and folly. Not for the first time, Lockhart wonders if it wouldn’t make more sense to retreat down the motorway towards London. But that would leave a metropolitan complex – two major cities and outlying towns totaling over two million people – at the mercy of a hostile occupying force.

All the alternatives are unthinkable. And so, as he returns to his desk, Lockhart is already on his mobile phone to the Ops Center down south, requesting authorization for the first ever operational activation of the SCORPION STARE system.

The Host has been riding for three and a half hours as they count time – nearly four
urük
hours – following one or another of the broad, eerily flat stone roads that the
urük
use for their carts. For a while now the ugly fired-clay and stone hovels of the underpeople have been clustering densely alongside the road, although it is still possible to glimpse open fields through the gaps between them. The Host leaves a trail of darkened windows and stopped
urük
-carts in its wake, bodies tumbling where they fall: the primitives have no defenses against
mana
-powered weapons, and the cavalry have only drawn their knives to cut through tangles of wires and fences.

But their mounts have been running at an extended canter for too long, covering ground at a pace that would have been a full gallop for regular horses. Even though their steeds are supernaturally strong (this pace would have killed a horse within an hour) they need to pause occasionally to reject heat and drink water, especially when laden with armor and riders. Thus, shortly after the first and second battalions pass Otley, Third of Heavy Cavalry commands a brief respite. The riders dismount from their steeds and lead them down the embankment to a river that runs beside the road for a short while, covered by the force’s air defense detachment and heavy weapon teams. Once the mounts are watered, their riders feed them a few kilos of meat, still raw and bleeding from the stasis cocoons. Then they take a few minutes to stretch their legs beneath the shelter of the defensive shield that the magi hold overhead.

“Well, that was the easy part,”
Sixth of Second Battalion remarks to her adjutant as she extends first one leg then the other, watching the small cluster of knights around Third of Heavy, who is already back in the saddle. (His enthusiasm is unwise, she thinks: it does no good to be first on the battlefield if you arrive too sore to be fully effective.)
“Tell your troopers to stay close and keep their weapons in hand. We’ll be in the thick of these slums before long and we can’t count on the lack of resistance continuing.”

“Yes, my Liege.”
The adjutant glances round, taking in the field of riderless mounts slobbering and snarling over their fodder and the soldiers variously rubbing sore joints, stretching, and sitting down on the grass.
“I can’t believe the foe hasn’t
noticed
us. How can they be so passive?”

“Oh, some of them noticed us all right!”
Sixth glowers.
“I believe First Battalion only stopped collecting scalps when Third threatened to crucify the next idiot who broke formation.”
Her frown subsides.
“Clearly All-Highest’s plan was sound, and I suppose there’ll be plenty of trophies to go round later. But remember Spies and Liars said that the enemy don’t use mana much,
not
that they’re defenseless.”

Adjutant of Second Battalion’s ears flatten thoughtfully.
“Indeed? If they don’t use mana what do their warriors use instead?”

“Look to your sword,”
Sixth says sharply.
“That flying engine was no toy, was it? And from the fireball when it crashed, it had some sort of energetic power source. The fact that we couldn’t sense it notwithstanding, we shouldn’t underestimate them.”

“Undetectable high energy propulsion?”
Her adjutant’s expression is queasy.
“I will warn my vassals to keep their eyes open. If they can use it to project missiles or darts as well
—
”

“Yes.”
Sixth pauses for a moment.
“Also, you have observed the lights along these roads, and the lightning-bearer wires?”
(The Host has lost more than two soldiers in the process of learning the hard way that steel armor and electricity distribution cables are best kept apart.)
“They don’t use mana but there’s clear evidence of organization here, a civilization of sorts. And the lightning-powered eyes on poles we keep having to burn out
–
who are the watchers, and what are they planning?”

Adjutant of Second pulls out her mirror and peers into its glassy depths. She tucks a stray lock of sweat-dampened black hair back under her helmet (for when exposed to the gaze of basilisk weapons, even wet hair will burn), then frowns at what she sees.
“We pass them every two-fifths of a league along these ways. The blue ones, I mean. The small black eyes are irregular, and the yellow boxes seem to be random but are associated with symbol-bearing steel signs.”
She slides her recording mirror back into its case, where it briefly illuminates the interior before it falls asleep.

“They serve different lieges,”
Sixth says slowly.
“And they’re seen along the larger roads, not the smaller paths.”
She smiles again, ears stirring under the fine metal weave of her mail coif.
“Once we are underway, instruct all unit commanders that they are to avoid dense concentration of lightning-powered eyes, if necessary detouring into side streets. They haven’t struck at us yet, but
…
”

Adjutant of Second’s eyes go wide and her ears flatten.
“Oh yes,”
she breathes.
“I’ll warn them at once!”
And with that, she scrambles into her saddle and nudges her mad-eyed steed into motion.

Highest Liege of Airborne Strike does not fly in the morning, for she is attached to All-Highest’s staff, in overall command of the air defense and strike assets of the Host. The two active firewyrms that skim the hilltops due north of Bradford are commanded by First Wing of Airborne Strike and his wing-sister. They fly with bat-like wings fully extended, enclosed canopies covering the pilots strapped to their backs. Their flight-magi sit below them in mirror-finished cages, able to see the world around them without being burned to a crisp by the early morning light; behind and below the flight crews’ howdahs numerous steel-jacketed packages are strapped to the dragons’ side-harnesses.

To an observer with the right kind of eyes – eyes capable of looking straight at a pair of airborne strike wyrms without being struck blind – the dragons leave a faint exhaust trail of pale yellow-green vapor, exudate from their digestive tracts that drools from the incendiary glands located just behind their second set of circular jaws. It’s only a few drops every few seconds, and most of it evaporates before it hits the ground, but where it settles the liquid burns away the morning dew and the pale fumes of combustion scorch the leaves and ground below.

The two dragons are following an approximation of the Host’s course, but moving considerably faster as they circle and turn south towards the vast
urük
-hive around the enemy palace. The pilots are tense, minds sunk deep within the sensoria of the brain leeches through which they control their mounts. They experience the world as firewyrms perceive it, while their magi maintain a perpetual watch for signs of hostile thaumaturgic emissions. But the
urük
don’t use
mana
in combat, which is why the first warning of trouble the dragonriders get is when their mounts see the approaching sky-daggers directly with the light-sensitive scales coating their hides.

“Contact,”
First Wing announces, a moment before Fourth Wing agrees.
“Targets approaching,”
followed by a bearing and distance loosely translatable as, “seven o’clock high and four hundred knots.”

The dragons, being largely biological constructs (if somewhat heavily augmented by
mana
-powered weapons systems and countermeasures), are traveling at a relatively sedate hundred knots. The sky-daggers are closing the distance terrifyingly fast, and there’s no way dragons can outrun them. It’s more evidence of the
urük
penchant for inanimate not-magic witchery, if evidence were needed. Contact is inevitable within ten minutes: but the dragons have evolved in hostile skies where to be seen is to be eaten, and the Host’s airborne combat doctrine has developed under similar circumstances, so they have certain advantages over their pursuers.

Meanwhile the crew of Quebec-1 and Quebec-2 have an unexpected problem.

“I’m looking for Contact One but I get nothing.” Quebec-2’s pilot says over the data link. “CAPTOR lock is firm but my head hurts when I try to eyeball them. Visual distortions.”

“Roger that.” Quebec-1 agrees. “My eyes are going funny, too. Countermeasures, go head-down.”

“Confirm optical countermeasures,” echoes the combat controller at Scampton. Eyeballs are a euphemism here: the fighter pilots each have a quarter of a million pounds of advanced electronic imaging equipment strapped to their heads. If they look at the floor of their cockpits they can see right through the airframe thanks to the high-resolution cameras plastered all over the aircraft and feeding their helmet-mounted displays. But where there’s a sensor there’s a jammer, and optical countermeasures are unwelcome but hardly unprecedented. Going head-down and closing on an unidentified target using instruments is something that fighter pilots hate; it means sacrificing situational awareness and ceding the initiative to whoever’s in your blind spot. But on the other hand —

“Visual flicker goes away when I use instruments,” Quebec-1 announces.

“PIRATE isn’t locking in sector acquisition mode,” says Quebec-2. The passive infrared tracker is the Typhoon’s other main target acquisition sensor – a giant heat-sensitive eyeball mounted just ahead of the windscreen. Normally it can accept targeting information from the CAPTOR-E radar, but for some reason it can’t pick up whatever the fighter’s radar set is seeing. A metal airframe reflecting sunlight, or the heat of an engine exhaust, ought to show up like beacons. But Contacts One and Two are too dim to distinguish from ground clutter. Things have just gone from bad to worse.

For a couple of minutes the two pilots try to reset their faulty sensors. But it rapidly becomes clear that the multimillion-pound infrared search and tracking systems on both aircraft are sulking identically. Radar can track the targets, but eyeballs – neither electronic nor human – can’t look on. “It’s a tightly focussed visual distortion,” Quebec-1 tells Scampton. “Similar to what migraines are supposed to be like. Can’t see the target with or without helmet cueing, just a moving knot in the landscape that hurts to look at. Closing to visual range may not help.”

“Roger that,” replies combat control. “Update on situation, we lost a civilian wide-body over the Pennines, adjacent to the ground track of Contacts One and Two. You are cleared for nose hot, engage at will if no-comply.”

“Nose hot,” confirms Quebec-1. “Select Fox-1.”

At this point, the two dragons are thirty kilometers north of the oncoming fighters and their AIM-132 short-range homing missiles. The Typhoons’ Attack and Identification radar alone is enough to cue the missiles’ on-board homing avionics. The missiles have their own infrared imagers, and as the AIS readies them for launch the thermal sensors chill down, ready to look at their targets. With weapons ready, Quebec-1 and Quebec-2 open their throttles wide and accelerate, closing to confirm before they launch that Contacts One and Two aren’t an innocent air ambulance or a police helicopter that’s forgotten its transponder.