I look around. I'm at the foot of a hill; on the
other side of it there's a wall, and a couple of pathetic corpses, and
half a platoon of SAS specialists. Behind me there's a petrified forest
and a castle of shadows, populated with nightmares. (Oh, and a hydrogen
bomb that's going to go off in about seventy minutes.) Where is
everybody? Strung out between the castle and the gate, that's where.
Got to tell Alan not to set off the bomb.
I pick up my sack of hands and stagger downhill toward the skeletal
trees, feet and ankles tensed with that walking on glass sensation you
get when you're afraid there's nothing but black ice underfoot, one
hand clutching the basilisk gun at arm's reach. Branches claw at me in
the twilight, making me flinch inside my helmet; they snap and tinkle
against my visor, rigid bundles of mummified twigs with all the heat
sucked out of them.
If there's more than one of the body snatchers
here
…
I skid and go down on one thigh, hard. Something
crunches underfoot, like twigs snapping. I lever myself upright, rub my
leg and wince, breath loud in my ears. Looking down I see a hump of
frozen brown, a small rabbit or a rat or
something else that's been dead for years.
Dead.
I stoop and
pick up my bag of severed hands, tagged for identification at a later
date.
Wouldn't this be a good time to think about precautions?
In case there are other demons stalking this frozen plain in stolen
bodies?
Well, yes. I cast a glance in the direction of
the redoubt, racking my brains for a half-forgotten lecture on occult
stealth technologies.
Fifteen minutes later—ten
precious minutes of which expire in a feverish rush of poking
clumsily at a severed ulna and radius with my multitool and a roll of
duct tape—I'm standing in the middle of the dead ground in front of
the
redoubt. Things have clearly gone very pear-shaped indeed. I clutch the
talisman like a drowning man and try to figure out what to do now.
(The talisman glows dimly, an eerie blue light
chewing away at the fingertips. To get it lit, I used the basilisk gun
on a tree stump and thrust it against the glowing coals. The deep
incisions in the palm are the red of firelight reflected in freshly
spilt blood. I grip the grisly artifact by its exposed wrist bones and
hope like hell that it performs as advertised. See, if you stick a
phase-conjugate mirror on the base of a Hand of Glory you can make it
spit light; but that's a modern perversion of its original
function … )
Overhead, the stars are going out one by one.
The moon is a blood-soaked red disk; shadows are creeping across the
landscape, settling across the hills I can glimpse through my
night-vision goggles. And something like a fire is burning on the
roofline above the last redoubt of the Ahnenerbe-SS: What's going on?
I try the radio again. "Howard to anyone, anyone
still out there, please respond." The hissing, frying interference
crashes in on my ears, obscuring any answer. I stumble forward on the
icy ground just as something that might once have been human dashes
around the side of the building, heading in the
direction of the gate. It doesn't see me, but someone inside sees it:
sparks blossom on the cold ground behind it, and I see brief muzzle
flashes coming from a window-slit on the second floor. It was one of
ours originally, but no human being can sprint around a building with
their helmet off and backpack missing in a
fimbulwinter
cold
enough to freeze liquid oxygen.
The possessed soldier raises something blocky to
its shoulder and sprays cartridge cases all over the night. Maybe one
or two of the bullets come close to the upstairs window, but if so they
don't stop whoever's upstairs from catching it with their next burst:
for a moment it capers across the ice, then it flops down and lies
still. "Shit," I mutter, and find myself stumbling into a clumsy trot
toward the gaping garage door with its welcoming airlock.
Nobody shoots at me; the talisman is doing its
job, fogging the senses of anyone who can see me. I skid to a halt just
outside, a nasty suspicion blossoming in my mind, and very carefully
inspect the threshold. Yup, there it is: a black box taped to the wall,
thin wire stretched taut across the threshold at knee level. Some wag
has stencilled
THIS SIDE TOWARD LIFE INSURANCE
CLAIMANT
on its case. I very carefully step over the tripwire
then try the radio again. "Howard to anyone. What's going on? Who's
shooting?"
A crackling whine flattens the answer, but at
least this time there
is
one: "Howard! What's your condition?
Report." I try to remember who it is, those clipped tones: Sergeant
Howe.
"I'm in the garage with a Hand of Glory," I say.
I swallow. "It got Chaitin while I wasn't watching him, but I got
away—shot it while it was trying to assimilate me. A demon, that is.
They take possession if they can touch you—it takes skin-to-skin or
electrical contact. There was more than one out here but I'm not sure
any are still up. I improvised a stealth talisman to get me back in
here; you've got to put me through to Alan,
immediately.
"
"Wait right there." He sounds tense. "You in the
garage?"
I try to nod, then answer: "Yeah, I'm in the
garage—I spotted the spring surprise in time. Look, this is urgent;
we've got to disable the demo gadget before we get out of here. If it
blows—"
The outer airlock door edges open. "Get your ass
in the airlock
now,
Howard. Close and lock the door. When it
cycles, put anything you're carrying down and raise your arms. When the
door opens, don't move until I say so. Don't even
breathe
until
I say so. Got it?"
"Got it," I say, and open the airlock door. I
freeze—then carefully put the Hand of Glory down outside the lock,
power down the basilisk gun and isolate the charge circuit, drop the
sack of severed hands, and make sure my palmtop is asleep before I look
inside the chamber again. I swallow. There's a green spheroid taped to
the inner door, a fine wire stretching from one end to the rubberised
gasket that seals the lock. Below it, there's another gadget: a
thaumometer, a sensor that monitors spatiotemporal disturbances
indicative of occult activity. That, too, has a wire vanishing inside
the gasket. I swallow again. "I'm stepping inside the lock now," I
say.
My legs don't want to move. "I'm closing the outer door."
I tell myself I know Alan, and he's not going to
do anything stupid. I tell myself that Sergeant Howe is a professional.
Locking myself in a room the size of a shower cubicle with a live hand
grenade on the end of a string still gives me the cold shudders.
Air hisses through vents and I raise my arms,
stiffly forcing the suit to comply. At the last moment I think to turn
and make sure that I'm leaning against the side of the lock, not facing
the inner door. Then the door clicks—audible, there must be air
pressure inside—and swings open. Someone is kneeling outside, pointing
a gun at me from behind a body that's sprawled on the floor right in
front of the lock.
"Bob." It's Alan. "If that's you, I want you to
tell me who else was in the classroom with us."
Phew.
"It was taught by Sophie, and we
were in it with Nick from CESG."
"That's good. And you're still wearing your
helmet. That's good, too. Now I want you to turn around slowly, keeping
your hands up—that's right. Now, I want you to slowly raise your
visor.
Hold it—keep your hands still." The guy with the gun keeps it
levelled
on my face. Mo was right: I never realised you could see the
grooves—lands—of a rifle barrel at three metres; it looks huge, large
enough to drive a freight train down.
Something jabs at my left leg and I nearly
stumble, then: "He's clean," announces someone who was right next to
me
all the time—I never noticed—and I lower my arms. The guy who's been
keeping me covered points his gun at the floor, and suddenly I'm
breathing normally again.
"Where's Alan?" I ask. "What's been happening
here?"
"I was hoping you could tell me," Alan says in
my left ear. I look round and he grins tensely. The grin doesn't reach
his eyes, which are the colour of liquid oxygen and just as warm. "Tell
me
exactly
what happened to you when you went outside. Tell it
like your life depends on it."
"Uh, okay." I shuffle away from the lock door
and someone—Scary Spice?—swings it shut again.
I spill the beans, including the way Chaitin
jumped me. I figure they already know that something's taking over
brains and bodies wherever possible. My eyes keep being drawn back to
the floor. It's Donaldson, the guy who was speculating about
meteorology earlier. He doesn't look real, somehow, as if he ought to
get up and walk away in a minute or two, peel off the rubber gore
applied by the special effects people and have a laugh with us over a
pint. "I figure the whole thing is a trap," I finish. "We were lured
here deliberately. Only one of the possessors came through to our
world, and it could only control one body at a time, but there may be
more here. They're working for, or are part of,
something that's not human, but that's had years to study us—to study
the survivors from the Ahnenerbe-SS. It took over some useful idiots
who tried to summon it from our side in order to use it for a terrorist
incident; then it stalked us, kidnapped Mo as bait. It did that because
it wants us to provide a power source that'll allow it to expand the
gate and push its main body through into our universe. It's a lot
bigger than the possessors we've seen so far—it's, like, it's achieved
a limited beachhead but it needs to grab an entire harbour from the
defenders—us—before it can land the main body of its forces."
"Right." Alan looks pensive. "And how do you
think it's going to do this?"
"The demolition gadget. What yield have you set
it to?" I ask.
Howe raises an eyebrow. "Tell him," says Alan.
"It's a selective yield gadget," says Howe. "We
can set it to anything from fifteen kilotons to a quarter of a
megaton—it's a mechanical process, screw jacks adjust the gap between
the fusion sparkplug and the initiator charge so that we get more or
less fusion output. Right now it's at the upper end of the yield curve,
dialled all the way up to city-buster size. What's this got to do with
anything?"
"Well." I lick my lips; it's really cold in here
now and my breath is steaming. "To open a gate big enough to bring
through a large creature like whatever ate this universe takes a whole
lot of entropy. The Ahnenerbe did it in this universe by ritually
murdering roughly ten million people: information destruction increases
entropy. But you can do it in other ways—an H-bomb is a really great
entropy
and
energy generator, it minimizes the information
content of
lots
of stuff." They look blank: I glare at them.
"Look, it's the intersection between thermodynamics and information
theory, right? Information content is inversely proportional to
entropy, entropy is a measure of how well randomized a system
is—that's
one of the core assumptions of magic, right? That you can transfer
energy between universes via the platonic realm
of ordered information—mathematics. I think what this monster has been
doing all along was raising enough hell via its minor agents to provoke
a response—one in which we'd lash out, giving it all the juice it
needs
to expand the gate. As it is, the minor gate it yanked Mo through is
shrinking; I figure that was all it could manage. It's drained so much
energy from this universe already that it had to wait for precisely the
right moment before it dared open that one; this place is falling
apart, and there may not be enough power for the monster to open even
one more minor gate. Have you noticed how the stars are going out and
we're getting radio interference? I think what we're seeing is fossil
starlight—what's left of this universe may only be a bit larger than
the solar system, and it's shrinking at close to light-speed. Give it
another few hours and it'll collapse like a soap bubble, taking the ice
giant with it. Unless we feed it, or them, or whatever the hell it is,
enough energy to shore open the gate to our own world and expand it
until they can squeeze through."
"Ah." Alan looks as if he's just swallowed
something unpleasant. "So. It's your considered opinion that our best
course of action would be to disable the bomb and retire, hmm?"
"That's about the size of it," I agree. "Where
did you plant the gadget anyway?"
"Downstairs; but that's a bit of a sore point,"
Alan comments airily. "The bomb's armed and we've switched over from
manual detonation control via the dead man's handle to the internal
timer. But there's a catch. You see, Her Majesty's Government doesn't
really
like the idea of leaving armed hydrogen bombs lying around the place
without proper supervision. PAL control is fine, and so is a detonation
wire and dead man's handle, but these things are designed in case they
might get overrun, and we wouldn't want to hand an H-bomb on a plate to
some random troublemaker, what?"
Alan begins to pace. Alan pacing, that's a bad
sign. "Once we've inserted the initiator, dialled
a yield, armed the detonators, punched in the permissive action codes,
set the timer,
then
removed the control wires, nothing's going
to stop it. Can't even open it up: someone messes with the tamper
piece, it calls 'tilt' and the game's over. Y'see, we might be a Soviet
Guards Motor Rifle formation that's just captured the bridge it's
strapped to. Or a bunch of uglies from the backwoods behind the Khyber
Pass. So, as you can understand, even conceding that letting it blow
here and now might be a very bad idea, it's going to go. Unless you
fancy trying your hand at dissecting a booby-trapped, ticking H-bomb,
and I don't recall seeing UXB training on your
résumé."