The Atrocity Archives (23 page)

"Close, but not close enough," Angleton says
coldly. He stands up, leaving the armless chair swinging—in the
confined space of the truck this is not a good idea. "You got some of
it right and the rest wrong. And what makes you think I can afford to
risk you? This is an OCCULUS job now: straight in, find out what's
there, plant demolition charges, straight out."

"Demolition charges." I look past his shoulder.
The door opens and a familiar face is coming in. Odd, I'd never
imagined what Derek the Accountant would look like in battle dress.
(Worried, mostly.)

"The commander's due in half an hour," Derek
says by way of introduction. "What's the goat doing here?"

"Enough." Angleton waves me to follow as he
heads for the door. I slide my feet into moon boots, follow him without
bothering to fasten the straps. I hurry down the steps into a flashing
hell of red and blue lights; Dutch police escorting sleepy hotel guests
and residents to safety, firemen gearing up with breathing apparatus in
the road. Angleton pulls me aside. "Interrupt if you see Captain
Barnes—"

"Who?"

"Alan Barnes," he says impatiently. "Listen." He
fixes me with a beady stare: "This is not a game. There's a very good
chance that Dr. O'Brien is already dead—in case you hadn't noticed,
there's no air on the other side of that gate, and unless her abductors
wanted her alive they won't have bothered with niceties like a
respirator for her. That lack of air is one of the reasons we must
close it as fast as possible, the other being to stop the people who
opened it from making use of it as a stable egress portal."

"You say
people
," I mutter. "Who? The
Ahnenerbe-SS?"

"I hope so," he replies grimly. "Anything else
would be infinitely worse. At the end of the war, Himmler ordered a
number of so-called werewolf units to continue the struggle. We've
never been able to track down the Ahnenerbe's final redoubt, but the
suspicion that it lies on the other side of a gate goes back a long
way—you've read OGRE REALITY, you can imagine why
the Mukhabarat might want to get in touch with them."

"So the other side of that gate is"—my mind
races—"a holdout from the Third Reich, a colony intended to keep the
dark flame burning and exact revenge on the enemies of Nazism in due
course … One that's had fifty years to fester and
grow on an alien world … But they lost the
coordinates for the return journey, didn't they? Something went wrong
and they were trapped there until—" I stop and stare at Angleton.
"You
hope
that's what's on the other side of the gate?"

He nods. "The alternatives are all much worse."

On further thought I have to admit he's right: a
colony of leftover Nazi necromancers and their SS bodyguards are
trivially dangerous compared to things like the one that took over Fred
the Accountant. And
they
are small beer by the standards of the
sea of universes, where malignant intelligences wait only for an
invitation to surge through a knothole in the platonic realm and infect
our minds.

"How are you going to deal with them?" I ask.
Angleton leads me around the truck; I can get a good view of the big
low-loader that squeezed past us, and there's some sort of tracked
vehicle sitting on its load bed. There's a crane, too. I peer closer,
but the cordon of cops around it bars my view. "How the hell are you
going to get that through a third-floor window?" I ask.

Angleton shrugs. "I'm sure the hotel owners will
file a claim on their building insurance." He looks at me. "Alan's men
are professionals, Robert. They're not used to being slowed down by
civilians like you—or me. What can you do that they can't?"

I lick my lips. "Can they open a temporary gate
back home if the door there slams shut behind them? Can they safely
disarm a live geometry node?"

"They're the Artists' Rifles," Angleton says
witheringly. "They're the bloody SAS, boy, 21st Battalion Territorial
Army; what did you think they were, a gun club? Who else do you think
we'd trust with a hydrogen bomb wired
up to a dead man's handle?"

I stare at the low-loader and realise that the
cops around it are all carrying HK-4s and facing outward. "I can
provide you with a different kind of insurance policy. Give me the
charts and I'll see they make it back alive—with Mo, if I have any say
in the matter. Plus, aren't you just a little
curious
about
what the Ahnenerbe might have been doing with a Z-2 and its descendants
for the past fifty years?"

"Do you want me to strangle him now, or wait
till he's finished annoying you?" asks Alan, who has sneaked up behind
me so quietly I never even noticed. Needless to say I almost jump out
of my skin.

"Leave him be." Angleton almost looks amused. "He's still young
enough to think he's immortal—and he's cleared for
active. All waivers signed, next of kin on file, carries an organ donor
card, that sort of thing. Can you use him?"

I have to turn my head to keep both of them in
view: Angleton, the old, dried-up ghost of intelligence spooks past,
and Alan—Captain Barnes, that is—schoolmasterly and intense. "That
depends," Alan tells Angleton. Then he focuses on me. "Bob, you can
come along on this trip on one condition. The condition is that if you
get any of my men killed by arsing around, I will personally shoot you.
Do you understand and agree?"

Somehow I manage to nod, although my mouth's
gone very dry all of a sudden. "Yup, got it. No arsing around."

"Well, that's all right then!" He claps his
hands together briskly, then softens very slightly. "As long as you do
what you're told, you'll pass. I'm going to give you to Blevins and
Pike; they'll look after you. I know what your specialities are: weird
alien runes, ancient Nazi computers, esoteric rocket science, that sort
of thing. Boffin city. If we run into anything like that I'll let you
know. What's your weapons clearance, if any?"

"I'm certified to level two, unconventional." I
frown. "What else do you need?"

"Ever used scuba gear?"

"Er, yes." I neglect to add that it was on a
holiday package deal, an afternoon of training followed by supervised
swimming near a coral reef, with instructors and guides on hand.

"Okay, then I'll leave Pike to check you out on
the vacuum gear. You'll be issued with a weapon; you are not, repeat
not,
to use it under any circumstances while any soldiers are left alive
unless you are explicitly ordered to. Got that?"

"Find Pike. Learn how to use vacuum gear. Do not
use weapon without orders."

"That'll do." Alan glances at Angleton. "He'll
make a good Norwegian Blue, don't you think?"

Angleton raises an eyebrow. "Bet you he'll be 'pining for the
fjords' within hours."

"Hah! Hah!" Alan doesn't bray: his laughter is
oddly fractured, as if it's escaping from a broken muffler. Loss of
control, that's what it is. He's thin, wiry, intense, and looks like
the kind of schoolmaster who's spent years slitting throats in strange
countries, and took to teaching as a way of passing on his knowledge. A
weird breed, not uncommon in the British public schools, who recycle
their own graduate cannon fodder to train the next generation in an
ethos of military service. And whose mannerisms are aped lower down the
academic ladder. Artists' Rifles indeed!

I try telling myself that Mo
will be all right, that they wouldn't have bothered abducting
her if they didn't want her alive, but it's no good: whenever I get
some idle time my brain keeps looping on the fact that someone I feel
strongly about has been snatched and may already be dead. Luckily I
don't have much time to obsess because Alan immediately drags me back
inside the OCCULUS control truck and throws me to Sergeant Martin Pike,
who takes one look at me, mutters something about the blessings of
Loki, and starts grilling me about nitrogen narcosis,
the bends, partial pressure of oxygen, and all sorts of other annoying
things I haven't studied since school. Pike is a sergeant. He's also a
Ph.D. in mechanical engineering and designs things that go fast and
explode, when he isn't being a weekend soldier in a special unit hung
off the SAS. He's met people like me before and knows how to deal with
them.

A second—and then a third—fire-control truck has
drawn up outside the evacuated hotel and we're in the back of vehicle
number two, which seems to be a mobile armoury. I'm stripping off the
survival gear and struggling into something like a bastard cross
between a body stocking and a piece of bondage rubberwear from
hell—low
pressure survival gear, Pike tells me—a lycra and silk contraption
that
seems to consist mostly of straps and is designed to do the same job as
a space suit in terms of holding me together and helping me breathe.

"Vacuum isn't as hostile as you probably imagine
if you've read too much bad science fiction," he says while I'm
grunting and wheezing over the upper half of the suit. "But you'd have
real fun breathing without a decent gas seal around your regulator, and
without this suit and pressurized goggles you'll end up half-blind and
covered in blood blisters within ten or twenty minutes. The real
problems are heat dissipation—there's no air around you to keep you
cool by convection and insulated from the ground, which is going to be
fucking
cold—and maintaining your breathing. Cooling we can deal with—this
cloth is porous, you start sweating and the sweat will evaporate and
keep you cool, and there's a drinking bottle in your helmet. Don't let
it run dry, because running one of these suits is a bit like running a
noddy suit in the Iraqi desert—you will sweat like hell, you will
drink
a pint of water and electrolytes every hour, and if you forget to do
that you will keel over from heat stroke. Turn round, now." I turn
round and he starts tightening straps all the way up my back as if I'm
wearing a corset. "These are to keep your rib cage under a bit of
elastic tension, help you breathe out."

"What if I need to take a piss?" I ask.

He chuckles. "Go ahead. There's enough adsorbent
padding that you probably won't freeze your wedding tackle off."

Trussed up in the pressure suit, I feel like a
fifties comic-book hero who's blundered through a fetish movie's
wardrobe. Pike passes me a bunch of elbow and knee protectors, a tough
overall, and a pair of massively padded moon boots. Somehow I struggle
into them. Then he comes up with a lightweight backpack frame with air
tanks and—"A rebreather? Isn't that dangerous?" I ask.

"Yup. We aren't NASA and we can't waste five
hours depressurising you down to run on pure oxygen. 'Sides, you're not
wearing a hard-shell suit. You're going to breathe a seventy/thirty
nitrogen-oxygen mix; we scrub the carbon dioxide out with these lithium
hydroxide canisters and recycle the nitrogen, adding oxygen to order."

"Uh-huh. How do I change tanks?"

"On your own? You don't—there's a trick to it
and we don't have time to teach you. You cut over from tank one to tank
two with the regulator valve here, then you ask me to change tanks for
you. If someone wants you to change their tank, which they won't unless
things go pear-shaped in a big way, you do it like this—" He
demonstrates on an unmounted backpack and I try to keep track of it.
Then he shows me the helmet and the chest-mounted monitors that keep
track of my gas supply, temperature, and so on. Finally he seems
satisfied. "Well, if you remember all that you're not going to die by
accident—at least not immediately. Still happy?"

"Um." I think about it. "It'll have to do. What
about radio?"

"Don't worry about it—it's automatic." He flicks
a switch or two on my chest panel, evidently making sure of that.
"You're on the general channel—everyone will be able to hear you
unless
they explicitly shut you out. Now … " He picks up a
gadget that looks like a pair of underwater digital
video cameras strapped with gaffer tape to either side of a black box
gizmo of some kind. "Have you ever seen one of these before?"

I peer closely, then unclip the lid on the box
and look inside. "I didn't know they'd successfully weaponised that."

He looks surprised. "Can you tell me what it is
and how it works?"

"Can I—yeah, I've seen this arrangement before
but only in the lab. This chip
here
is a small custom-built
ASIC processor that emulates a neural network that was first identified
in the
cingulate gyrus
of a medusa. Turns out you can find the
same pathways in a basilisk, but … well. There's a
load of image processing stuff on the front end, behind those video
cameras. Now, I would guess that the two cameras are the optical
component of this gadget: we're performing some sort of wave
superposition on the target, so … "

"Fine, fine." He passes me a somewhat
shop-soiled video camera manual. "Give this a read. And this." He
hands
me a bundle of typed pages with bright red
SECRET
headers, then passes me the lash-up. I look it over dubiously: there's
an arrow on top of the neural network box with the caption
THIS SIDE TOWARD ENEMY
, and a flat-panel
camcorder viewfinder on the back so you can pretend it's just a
computer game you're playing with while you kill people.

What this gadget does violates the second law of
thermodynamics: nobody's quite sure why it's so specific, but the
medusa effect seems to be some kind of observationally mediated quantum
tunnelling process. It turns out that something like 0.01 percent of
all the atomic nuclei of carbon in the target zone acquire eight extra
protons and a balancing number of neutrons, turning 'em into highly
electronegative silicon ions. A roughly balancing proportion of carbon
nuclei just seem to vanish, wrecking whatever bonds they were part of.

"How much damage can this thing do to a person?"
I ask.