The Nightmare Stacks: A Laundry Files novel (41 page)

“You’re not to use satnav!” Lockhart snaps. “You will follow the route as directed from this office. Which will be plotted to avoid contact with enemy outriders,” he adds, slightly less oppressively. “We are losing camera coverage on the highways north and west, and that’s where the incident reports are clustering. You don’t want to go that way.”

“Understood —” Pinky sounds a whole lot less grumpy all of a sudden.

“Is Alex all right?” Pete asks.

“He’s texting and emailing updates, so for the time being we presume so, yes.” Pete’s stomach lurches.
Texting us updates
can cover a multitude of sins, including
captured by enemy
and
held at gunpoint
. “We want you to be prepared to extract or support him if necessary.”

“Okay. Where are we going?” Pinky asks. Lockhart tells him, and Pinky starts swearing. “It’ll take us
hours
to get there and back again!”

Lockhart is unsympathetic: “There are reports of dragons: all flights are grounded. He’s depending on you.”

“Okay, we’re on our way,” says Pete. He’s unsure whether to feel relieved (they’re heading away from the onrushing incursion, taking a route that will give it a wide berth) or apprehensive about what they’ll find at the far end.

“Drive on,” Pinky tells him. “Then at the end of the street, hang a left and keep going up the Burley Road for as many miles as it takes.” Pete lowers his visor and puts Ilsa back in gear again, then moves off with a grating and rumbling of tracks and chain mail.

Daylight finds a pall of smoke rising from burning buildings and crashed cars as the Host rumbles through the northwest suburbs of Leeds at a trot, the sun glinting off the heads of their lowered lances.

Entering an enemy’s capital is one of the most dangerous tasks any land army can undertake. First there is the siege and the breaching of walls, tangible and otherwise. Then there is the grim prospect of advancing in the face of ambush at every corner, hostile warriors who know the ground intimately using each building for cover, of enemy magi dug in behind enchanted fortifications nullifying one’s death spells and casting curses and glamours of their own – and that is before the final approach across the death ground surrounding the enemy sorcerer’s keep, guarded by demons and the reanimated corpses of all those who have died earlier in the conflict, beneath skies patrolled by dragons and under the purview of basilisks, subject to attack by monstrous summonings. Normally it’s a job for infantry with heavy support; cavalry have no place in such an assault, losing the advantage of maneuver that makes them so valuable on open ground.

But the Host’s entry into the
urük
capital is not like that at all.

The
urük
are lazy and incompetent defenders, unable to contain the sprawl of their serfs’ hovels within decent walls. Their roads meander across hill and dale without checkpoints or wards of any kind, much less stone ramparts sanctified with the blood of human sacrifices. While they are profligate with bottled lightning and eyeballs on sticks they seem to have very little idea of security, unless it is their way to build such ugly, sprawling, chaotic hives of laborers that intruders can’t find their way through to the overseers.

Sixth of Second Battalion rides at the head of her fourth squadron, beside the standard. Two of the battalion’s countermeasure magi and the unblind horrors they control follow close behind. In compliance with All-Highest’s wishes, the First and Second Battalions have split up into four columns, running parallel across a front roughly half a kilometer wide. She rides with one of the inner columns, which keep to the broad
urük
highway they followed as far as the fringe of the city. The other three columns ride along backstreets and crash through fences and hedges between curiously pointless yards planted with animal fodder. They make no effort to remain unseen, but rely on their visual countermeasures. The
urük
seem to have no idea about prostrating themselves or avoiding the attention of their betters, and so the front of the column is marked by a chaotic shattering of windows and burning doorways as the savages gaze upon their new masters and spontaneously combust. They die in the hundreds, and the stench of roast flesh and burning wood rises up on every side, and
still
there is no sign of organized resistance. It’s almost, Sixth of Second thinks queasily, as if they don’t understand the concept of combined arms warfare.

The cavalry advances for an hour through endless masses of near-identical houses and drab store buildings, finally pausing beside the fount of
mana
spiraling out from the ley line anchor towards which they have been riding. Here, as their storage cells refill, the scouts report another large road ahead. And this is where they meet the first organized resistance.

This road is wide – by the markings the
urük
paint along such tracks, it seems to be built to accommodate six carts side by side – and there is an embankment planted with grass and trees to either side. According to the maps supplied by Airborne, this road circles the
urük
stronghold. It’s the perfect place for an outer city wall: either one built of stone and patrolled by a garrison, or a shrike-fence of impaled living dead. But there is no wall. Nor are there any random
urük
-carts beetling along until their drivers see their death rise before them and expire. Instead, the way is blocked by a row of white-painted carts with flashing lights atop their lids, spanning the circular plaza where the two main roads meet. (This plaza contains only a circular bed of vegetation. It lacks a guard tower, gibbet, or crucifixion tree, or any other symbol of authority to remind the serfs who they belong to.)

Sixth orders a pause as the circle comes into view between the trees lining the boulevard leading into the city.
“Scout troop, clear the approach to that plaza. Second magus, provide cover.”

The file of cavalry pounds forward, maces raised to scour the trees and buildings set back to either side of the road. Roofs shatter and crack, and trees go up like flares. But there is no more resistance than they have encountered so far, until the first four riders approach to within two hundred meters of the plaza. Then slingshots crackle into life, deafeningly loud and with a ridiculous tempo of fire: their wielders must be magically enhanced. Then a much louder roar heralds the arrival of some sort of crew-served projectile weapon. It lances towards the riders on a plume of flame and explodes.

Sixth of Second feels the sudden knife-sharp absence of two of her soldiers and the dulled-but-informative excruciation of two more as steel-jacketed pellets smash through armor and split skulls.
“Second Lance, wheel and flank left. Fourth Lance, flank right. First and Third, forward under cover. Fire at will.”

There is a staccato banging as of giant slave lashes, then the flare and rumble of
urük
-carts torching off, the rock oil they carry in tanks boiling and exploding as the
mana
-charged impulse of a dozen cavalry maces slam into them. There are screams, abruptly punctuated by the pop of deflagrating skulls. Sixth receives the all-clear from the lance leaders and approaches the roadblock. The wreckage of eight or nine white-and-red carts lies crumpled and burning, scattered across the intersection. Two more carts, these ones much larger and painted green, lie on their sides. The smoking corpses of the
urük
are sprawled behind these futile barricades, some of them in blue/black uniforms, others in the colors of dappled dirt. Charred, twisted limbs grasp strange angular contraptions: these must be
urük
bolt-throwers.
“Troop leaders, report,”
Sixth calls.

“Scout: two dead, two down but serviceable. Bullet wounds
–
they’re using steel.”
 

Sixth twitches irritably. Iron is the oldest countermeasure; slaves are crucified merely for touching implements made of the metal. Bolt-throwers that can punch through armor at close range could be deadly, if the enemy has anything resembling defensive wards. The rocket weapon in contrast looks nasty but is ineffective against warded armor. To all appearances, the enemy have no battle magic whatsoever. Sixth begins to wonder if perhaps All-Highest’s plan for the Host’s diversionary advance might be excessively cautious, rather than the last-ditch gamble she believed they were engaged in.
“Magi first through fourth, chameleon cover. Magi five through eight, melt any eyes that see.”

Magus sixth:
“What about the electric orbs?”

Sixth:
“Those too.”
She waves at her adjutant, who raises the staff. The cavalry company forms up around her and the march resumes, crossing the Leeds ring road and the flaming wreckage of three police Armed Response Units and a platoon of Territorial Army soldiers. Smoke rises on the morning breeze as the Host burns a clear-cut half a kilometer wide on either side of their advance, firing a path through the thickening suburbs as they advance towards the witch queen’s palace at the center of the
urük
-hive, now barely seven kilometers away.

Shortly after the Sixth Battalion crosses the ring road, decisions are made in the Quarry House control room that will subsequently be found wanting.

Gerald Lockhart, SSO8(L), Colonel (retired), Bronze Team Incident Controller (Headquarters North), has been on duty since 9 p.m. on Saturday night, after putting in a full day’s work on other affairs during the preceding day. He was called in by the DM, in response to an urgent update on the previous week’s assessment by Forecasting Operations. And he was OIC when the office received a notification of a Code Red incursion from trainee operations officer Alex Schwartz – me – shortly after midnight.

Over the following eight hours he coordinated with the West Yorkshire Metropolitan Police gold commander at Elland Road, the OCCULUS incident crew operating out of Wakefield, and the operations room established at Army GHQ in Andover. He has also briefed the Assistant Director of Operations at the New Annex in London, and (most recently) a very perturbed assistant to the Chief Secretary to the Cabinet Office in Whitehall. By dawn on Sunday he had been awake for over thirty hours, tracking a crisis of ever-expanding but indeterminate scope. A large body of operational research demonstrates that human beings suffer disproportionately from fatigue-induced errors of judgment after twelve hours of concentration at work; while Gerald Lockhart had long experience of pushing himself under crisis conditions, he was about to make a fatal mistake.

The garbled reports coming in to the incident room outlined a cone of silence approaching the city from the northwest. Outside the cone everything appeared normal, but within it, queries were not responded to in a timely manner, or at all. The Police gradually became less communicative and helpful as their assets were increasingly committed and their situational awareness degraded. Their emergency response telephone centers were overwhelmed by reports of road traffic accidents, house fires, and missing persons. The police helicopter was grounded, crew flying hours exceeded and an urgent maintenance interval overrun – it had been quartering the skies for hours, from one messy single-vehicle FATACC to another all night long, and the helicopter unit’s ground controller reluctantly took the decision to withdraw it for urgent maintenance. Requests were submitted for helicopter support from other regions, but more aircraft would not arrive before mid-morning. At six thirty, purely on the basis of the spike in accidents, the police commander on duty put the major incident plan into operation, alerting regional hospitals and calling up off-duty personnel: but the expected influx of injuries hadn’t materialized.

There were no survivors, and a steady trickle of police officers were going ominously dark, not answering their Airwave radios or mobile phones. Then news of the airliner accident near Otley arrived.

Lockhart and his ad-hoc team were confronted with a terrible dilemma. Forecasting Ops specified some sort of incursion targeting HQ North. Dr. Schwartz had gone missing after reporting an incursion out past the ring road. Lockhart had already mobilized all available personnel in Leeds, opened up the arsenal in the archive stacks of the Royal Armouries museum, and sent bodies to lock down the approaches to the office complex. Requests to the Police to send additional forces had been ignored: the Leeds Met were overstretched and all their civil emergency plans assumed that support would arrive from the Ministry of Defense, not flow in the opposite direction. However, an embryonic defensive plan was taking shape.

If Quarry House was really the target of whatever was coming, then Lockhart had a duty to defend the site. But with inadequate trained personnel on hand to mount a conventional defense of the site, Lockhart would have to activate the area defenses. Meanwhile, the Airwave receiver in the corner of the ops room was telling a terrifying story of escalation as successive police and emergency responders survived long enough to broadcast garbled partial reports.

At half past nine in the morning, Lockhart picked up the phone to the Regional Camera Control Center attached to the Police HQ at Elland Road. “This is Quarry House incident commander. I’m calling for MAGINOT BLUE STARS at this time.” There was an exchange of authorizations, very formal: Lockhart (normally imperturbable) was seen to wipe his forehead with a tissue as he waited for acknowledgment. “Yes. Lima Sierra One to MAGINOT BLUE STARS, autonomous response at this time. Good. Activate it now.” He puts the phone down and glances at Jez Wilson, who’s watching: “So that’s done.”

MAGINOT BLUE STARS is the Q-Division-approved software that co-opts many of the roadside and urban infrastructure cameras in British cities, building an ad-hoc Basilisk network. Developed specifically to deal with outbreaks of eaters in built-up areas, the SCORPION STARE network performs realtime target recognition and transmutation. It is best deployed when the civilian population it is intended to protect are locked down in their homes, under curfew, and only alien monsters roam the streets.