The Nightmare Stacks: A Laundry Files novel (48 page)

Eighty troopers in armor are galloping after them, lowering bright-tipped lances that converge to a point on his breastplate, which suddenly feels as flimsy as a sheet of kitchen foil. They ride armored steeds that at first glance resemble heavyset draft horses, but have blue-glowing eyes set narrow to either side of a fluted, spiraling horn, mouths that snarl to reveal the gaping fangs of a carnivore. A growing shriek of pure, animalistic rage rises from the mounts: the soldiers sit astride them in deathly silence. It’s as if they’re puppets dangling by strings of power from the furious will of All-Highest, emptied of volition and set atop the equoid mass like grotesque trophies as they give chase.

Ilsa lurches as Pete botches the shift up into second gear. Alex gasps and hugs the twin grips. There’s some kind of box between them with a green-glowing light and a red switch-cover, and a button atop each handle. The nearest riders are leaping the dry stone walls; as he watches, one ploughs right through the wall. It explodes in a spray of stone chips. The unnatural mount keeps right on coming, as oblivious as a tank. A vicious headache clamps the top of Alex’s skull in a circular vise, squeezing until it feels as if his head must explode. Cassie screams in pain and flops backwards and Alex feels a sudden spike of rage, his own anger adding to the conflagration as he squeezes his thumbs on the firing buttons.

A juddering roar like the end of the world spews bright sparks from the spinning barrels of the minigun. The ammo belt jumps and lurches across Cassie’s lap like an angry python. Ilsa rocks and bucks beneath Alex’s backside and he loses track of the barrel, letting go of the firing switches as it veers skyward, still spewing a tinkling rain of hot brass cartridge cases across Pinky. Pinky is shouting something but Alex can’t hear, because his ears are ringing as if he’s just spent three hours in the mosh pit of the very loudest industrial gig ever.
Better bring earplugs next time you come to a cavalry charge,
he observes. “What?” he shouts.

Pinky repeats himself, twice, with increasing vehemence. Alex struggles to bring the gun barrels back down as he finally gets it: “Go for the eyes, Boo!” The first riders are barely a hundred meters away and closing the gap. Alex’s head is rattling in his helmet like a pea in a whistle. He compromises and points the gun in the general direction of the riders’ heads, then clamps down on the firing buttons again and walks it left to right, then back again. The results are explosively, bloodily messy. The horse-things keep going even when bullets punch holes in their chest plates and tear great chunks out of their legs: it takes a head shot to drop one. Cassie moans but hauls another intestinal loop of ammunition out of the box on the back. Pinky is giggling, or screaming: it’s hard to tell over the roaring jackhammer of the gun.

We’re not going to make it,
Alex realizes numbly.
There are too many of them.
The whirling barrel tips are glowing red and there’s a stench of hot metal and gun smoke. Horse-things are going down, snapping and biting at their riders – he sees one snip an armored head right off a body, as neatly as a guillotine – but there are more of them coming. Ilsa’s too slow and the gun must be running low on ammunition and he has no idea how to reload it.
They want me alive, but the others are of no interest
– All-Highest has no use for Pete or Pinky, and as for what he’ll do to Cassie if he catches her —

Alex desperately tries to recall his eater-summoning macro, but realizes the cavalry will all have protective wards. Then the belt of ammunition snaking across Cassie’s lap lashes its tail at her – she cries out – and vanishes into the gun, leaving nothing behind. With the roar silenced, the world seems as calm as a snow-covered landscape.

“We’re out of ammo! Can you do anything?” he shouts in Cassie’s ear. She still has her mace gripped in both hands, but its tip is dull and her eyes have rolled up as if she’s having a seizure. There’s another lurch and Pete notches up another gear. Alex looks around desperately. They must be doing almost forty kilometers per hour, juddering and bouncing down the footpath. But the surviving knights are gaining ground. “Don’t those things ever
stop coming
?” He doesn’t realize he’s given voice to the thought until he bites his tongue, painfully hard, and feels the weirdly acrid tang of vampire blood. “I can’t hear myself think,” he mumbles. He can’t hear much at all. He can feel Ilsa’s engine bellowing, feel the grinding of tracks on dry mud through his legs. The deafening clangor of nerve damage rings loud in his ears, and his own voice is curiously muffled. He can just about discern the sound of a lawnmower or light plane, rising to an angry hornet buzz: then the Reaper drone comes over the cliff.

Most drones are toys. But this is an MQ-9 Reaper, the real thing: a military aircraft the size of a small airliner, with cruciform wings, a pusher propeller, and ominous racks of Hellfire missiles under each wing. It’s a dedicated ground attack aircraft, used in situations where the skies are too hostile for manned aircraft or helicopter gunships, and it’s zeroing in on the emissions from Alex’s phone – the phone All-Highest is carrying. The sky splits open and rockets lance overhead, converging on the rear of the column of pursuing cavalry. A smoky fireball rises, shattered fragments of armor and body parts flying as four antitank missiles tear into the clump of All-Highest’s guard. The band of pain around Alex’s forehead vanishes instantly, as All-Highest’s thaumic offensive ceases to batter against his ward. For a second it’s silent, and then the thunderous noise of the explosions reaches them.

“What the fuck?” The cavalry are slowing their headlong charge, equoid steeds nipping at each other’s flanks, riders shaking their heads as if dazed. Some are still following, but others turn and raise hands to point at the sky behind him. Alex leans back as the draconic shadow of the killer drone soars across the valley. “Was that —”

A hand grips his left shoulder as Cassie sits up. “Yes,” she says hoarsely. He can still barely hear her.

“What?” he demands, looking around for something to throw at the closing riders, now barely twenty meters behind them.

“It’s all right.” Alex looks round sharply. Cassie’s smile is luminous, her eyes glowing the precise same shade as the will-o’-the-wisp dancing in the head of her mace. “I can take things from here,” she assures him as she raises her right hand in a stiff-armed salute to the charging cavalry troopers, and continues in the mode of imperative command:
“I rule you now! Yield to the new All-Highest!”

Suddenly and without warning, the wards over Quarry House fade out.

“What.” On the rooftop, Jez Wilson stares up at the sky. “The fuck!” She pulls out her phone and checks her OFCUT app. Blinks, exits the app, and restarts it.

“They’ve stopped zapping us.” Doris Knight is peering at her own phone in disbelief.

“Huh. They had to run out of available energy sources sooner or later —”

“No,” Doris says urgently, “they’ve also stopped throwing those darts around. What’s going on?”

“I have
no
idea —” Jez pauses. Then she nips around the side of the barricade and looks over the edge before she drops and crawls rapidly backward. “You’re right, though,” she calls. Her ears are ringing, so she has to shout.

“What
now
?”

Jez looks round. Lockhart is standing in the middle of the roof, well back from the parapet, talking into his radio headset. He sees her and beckons. “I’m being summoned. Over here.”

She finds Lockhart in the middle of a small knot of arriving warm bodies. His expression is vacant, as if all capacity for thought has fled. “Cease fire, cease fire,” he calls, his voice flat. “Conserve ammo. Prepare to start up again on my word, but” – he takes a deep breath – “just hold everything.”

He notices Jez standing there. “What happened?” she demands.

“Word from Forecasting Ops: if they stop shooting, we’re to stop shooting, too.” He takes another deep, panting gulp of acrid air that stinks of diesel fumes and smokeless powder. “They haven’t been wrong so far, so…”

A sudden spike of hope as he meets her eyes: “Maybe Dr. Schwartz got us that miracle?”

“Witness.”
 

Alex licks cracked, dry lips with a tongue that throbs in time to his pulse as he steps down from the Kettenkrad and walks towards Cassie.

She stands facing a half-circle of dismounted knights in armor, their occult weapons sheathed and their knees bent. Beyond them, other soldiers are silently safing their mounts with muzzles and hobbles. (Some are dealing with the injured chargers: it’s a tense and bloody business, for damaged equoids don’t simply scream piteously and wait to die like horses.)

“Witness: I am your liege,”
Cassie – All-Highest – repeats, striking a pose that bespeaks all the depths of self-confidence that Alex knows he lacks.

The blaze of light around her head almost dazzles Alex’s V-parasites. He waits patiently, holding his hands behind his back to conceal their shaking. He’s out in daylight when every instinct says he should take cover from the lethal burning radiance of the daystar. Furthermore, he’s standing in front of a bunch of skin-crawling alien monsters in unicorn drag, surrounded by the amoral psychopathic warriors of a master race that conquered Europe from Galway to the Urals and built its palaces in the drained lowland basin of the Mediterranean back when his own ancestors were figuring out better ways to knap flint. He’s about to do something very inadvisable, something that will attract the attention of very important people. Worst of all, Pete is pointing a smartphone on a selfie stick at him, not merely capturing Cassie’s speech but streaming it live to a projection screen somewhere where those very important people will be watching him. The way today is going downhill he’s going to end up on the TV news, and his mother will give him hell ever after because his trousers look as if he’s wet himself.

“We recognize the All-Highest we are sworn to obey,”
chorus the half-circle of officers (and a few thoroughly shrouded magi).

She half-turns and raises her left hand. She crooks an imperious finger towards Alex. “You may approach,” Cassie says in English.

Alex shuffles warily forwards. He pauses just beyond arm’s reach and looks at her. Making eye contact with the All-Highest is almost painful. There’s Cassie in there, but there’s also an ancient and puissant network of
geases
, a mass of compulsions and obligations that once encompassed tens of millions of minds: a web of command, the central node of the empire which now rests upon her brow.

“For the record, please identify yourself as we discussed, in English and in the High Tongue,” she says in English, then repeats herself for her audience.

Alex licks his lips again. “I am Alex Schwartz, enrollment number 5078031, a sworn member of Q-Division, Special Operations Executive, an agency of the Ministry of Defense.” The Laundry, by any other name.
Just please don’t ask me what my grade is, because it’s embarrassingly low.
Then he translates as best he can in Enochian, paraphrasing the words where necessary and laying claim to a new alias:
“Magus Seventh of Occult Defense.”

“Witness,”
All-Highest repeats to her grim-faced audience.

“We witness.”
 

She looks at him, and Alex forces himself to meet her eyes. Is it his imagination, or does she look nervous? “I unilaterally order the forces that have come under my command to cease military action immediately, and offer their surrender to you,” she says evenly.

Alex swallows. “I accept your surrender.”

The mask of All-Highest cracks, and Cassie peers at him again, frightened and apprehensive. “Is there anything else?” he reminds her, acutely aware that this is the biggest gamble of all.

“Yes,” she says quietly, then, louder, to the watching eyes and camera: “
YesYes.
I hereby declare that I, and all my people, are refugees under the terms of the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. We cannot return to our home because we have a well-founded fear of being destroyed by the Dead Gods from beyond the ends of the universe that have returned to feed on this and other worlds. Accordingly” – she pauses, then looks past Alex, straight at the camera lens held in Pete’s slightly shaky grip – “I claim asylum for all surviving members of my people in accordance with the terms of the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act of 2006. That is all.”

Then she walks into his open arms and they stand there, together for a while.

I want to thank first and foremost my usual crew of test readers for kicking the tires and spotting the obvious defects before they ran over my feet. And in particular I’d like to single out Nelson Cunnington for his sterling work on untangling the timeline of the last half of the novel, Squadron Leader Simon Bradshaw (retd) for his insights into the likely complications of dragon v. Typhoon engagements, Martin Sinclair for advice on Army maneuvers, and all the other ex-forces folks who pitched in on this one.

I’d like to apologize to the Leeds International Animation Festival for moving the date of their event by several months, citing dramatic license in my defense.

I’d also like to apologize to the folks working on the Barnton Quarry Restoration Project for appropriating the details of their ROTOR R4 bunker, folding, spindling, and mutilating it, and using it for the Leeds War Room Region 2 site. (Which wasn’t part of the ROTOR air defense network, but dates to the same era…)