The Atrocity Archives (25 page)

Mist spurts out around me as I walk through the
gate, and suddenly the ground under my feet isn't carpet anymore: it's
crumbly, crunchy, like a hard frosted snowfall over gravel. I hear a
faint buzz as heat exchangers switch on in my helmet, using the warmth
of my breath to heat the air I'm breathing in. My skin prickles,
abruptly feeling tight, my suit seems to contract all around me, and I
emit an enormous and embarrassing fart. External air pressure: zero.
Temperature: low enough to freeze oxygen. Jesus, it
is
springtime on Pluto.

Pike drives his gadget forward about five
metres, halfway to the parked robot, then stops and begins unreeling a
spool of cable from on top of it. He almost backs into me before I get
out of his way. "Bob, take this." He hands me some kind of
joystick-like gadget with a trigger built into it, plugged into the
wire.

"What is it?" I ask, thumbing my intercom to his
channel.

"Dead man's handle. We use two of them to
detonate while we're out of range of the permissive action link
signal—this side of the gate. Go on, pull the trigger, I've got the
other one. It's perfectly safe to let go of one trigger at a time, it
only goes bang if both triggers are released for ten seconds at the
same time."

"Gee, thanks. How long did you say this wire is?"

I lumber in a circle, taking care not to let the
wire get twisted around my feet as I take in the view. The gate is
inscribed in a low wall; our footsteps have obscured the transient map
in front of it, but behind the wall that supports the aperture the
pattern is more or less intact (along with the two victims who were
sacrificed to open it). The ground is crunchy, like loose soil after a
heavy frost. Behind us and to the left and right it slopes up toward a
low ridge; in front, the ground slopes down and broadens out into a
valley. The stars overhead are unwinking, dimensionless points of light
in a harsh vacuum. They look reddish, demonic eyes staring
down at me; a universe of red dwarves, long after the sun has burned
down.

Alpha and Bravo teams have fanned out ahead and
behind the wall, advancing in a curious duck-walking crouch from cover
to cover. I spot a lump sticking out of the ground about five metres
away, and plod over to inspect it. It's a tree stump, shattered half a
metre above the ground and hard as ice. I reach out to touch it and a
thin mist bursts from the wood—I yank my fingers back before the
stream
of gas can chill them into frostbite. Wood crumbles and falls away from
the stump, shattered by the warmth. I shudder inside my layers of
compression fabric and insulation, and fart again.

There are boot imprints in the ground behind the
gate, and they don't look like ours.

"Howard, get back to the gate. Don't tangle up
the wire you're holding."

"Understood." I stomp back toward the gate,
collecting loops of wire from the handle (which I have carefully
avoided arming).

"Give." An anonymous, bulky figure holds out a
hand: above the visor I see the name
BLEVINS
.
I pass Roland the trigger and he attaches it to his chest with a Velcro
pad, then heads for the low rise behind the gate.

"Howard, Barnes here. I'm on the rise behind
you, twenty metres upslope. Come tell me what you think of this." A
click
as he hops frequency, to check on everybody else in turn.

I come up beside him on the rise and find him
hefting a heavily insulated camera in front of his faceplate.
Someone—Sergeant Howe, I think—is crouching farther up the slope with
some kind of shotgun or grenade launcher in his arms. "Come on and look
at this," Alan says; he sounds mildly amused as he waves me forward.
"Keep your head low and no sudden movements. That's far enough, Bob."

I can just peep over the ridge, which falls away
abruptly in front of me. More dead tree stumps;
the ground beneath me, the crunching—now I can see that it's grass,
freeze-dried and mummified beneath a layer of carbon dioxide frost.
Hills or low mounds of some kind rise in the near distance, and then—

"Disneyland?" I hear myself saying.

Alan laughs quietly. "Not Disneyland. Think Mad
King Ludwig's last commission, as executed by Buckminster Fuller."
Cheesecake crenellations, battlements with machicolations, moat and
drawbridge and turrets. Spiky pointed roofs on the towers—like the
police stations in West Belfast, designed to deflect incoming mortar
fire. Arrow slots filled with mirror glass half a metre thick. Radomes
and antenna masts in the courtyard where you'd expect armoured knights
to mount up.

"I didn't know the RUC were Cthulhu-worshippers."

"They're not, laddie," says Howe, and I flush. "Check out the slope
up to that moat. Probably got rammed earth behind
those walls, but they're not really expecting direct artillery fire.
Intruders on foot, rockets, I don't know what—but not tanks or direct
fire."

"They won," Alan says distantly. "This isn't a
fortification. Bob, I should apologise: it
is
a police
station." Light glistens on the Gestapo battlements as I try to
understand what he means.

"What happened to them?" I ask.

"Look," says Howe, pointing off to the left. I
follow his direction and get my first inkling of just how far beyond
our experience this world is. From up here the moon is visible, gibbous
and close to the horizon; but the familiar man-in-the-moon pattern of
marias and seas has been erased, replaced by a shadow-scribed visage
carved across the entire lunar surface in runes ten kilometres deep.
It's astonishing to behold, a miracle testimonial to one man's vanity
on a scale that makes Mount Rushmore or the pyramids look like a
child's sandcastle. And from the small tuft of moustache
to the keynote cowlick of hair, the face is instantly recognisable.

From a quarter of a million miles away, Hitler's
image stares at me across a land given over to ice and shadow. And I
know the Ahnenerbe can't be far away.

The Artists' Rifles storm
the Ahnenerbe's secret fortress with speed and
élan, moderated
only by tactical caution and a degree of perplexity that deepens as
they determine that the castle is, in fact, unoccupied.

First in is the little reconnaissance robot,
portaged into position and released by a couple of tense soldiers half
a kilometre away from the rest of the expedition. As it rolls onto the
flat killing apron around the redoubt, Bravo team moves like ghosts
through the petrified forest on the other side of the castle. Everybody
is tense: nobody talks on radio while their line of sight is on the
castle, and nobody wants to be visible, either—on infrared against
this
chill landscape, a human being will stand out like a magnesium flare.

The robot rolls out onto the killing apron in
front of the castle, little puffs of snow fountaining up behind its
treads. At this point if anyone is guarding it we'd expect to see
fireworks, but nothing happens: nobody shoots, nothing lights up. I
hunch over behind Hutter's shoulder, watching the video feed via the
secure fibre-optic cable. The castle is dark, except for a central
building that glows red hot, two hundred and
fifty degrees hotter than the ambient temperature. It silhouettes the
battlements, towers, and radomes nicely.

Alan circles a hand above his head twice, and a
long way away a sleeping dragon erupts. A dot of light sizzles across
the frozen landscape on a jet of flame and slams into the outer door of
the gatehouse: lumps of stone and metal tumble silently through the
empty vacuum above it. Things begin to happen very quickly as Alpha
team lays down fire on the gatehouse and Bravo team skids out across
the ice behind the castle and makes for the forbiddingly high walls. A
chain of fireworks erupts from the ground and bursts over the
battlements in front of them, then—

Nothing. Nothing but silence and the jerky
movements of Alan's men. They reach the foot of the wall and swarm up
it as if they aren't wearing heavy backpacks, while a second Dragon
launcher pops a rocket off at the front of the castle and
someone—Sergeant Howe, I think—beats the courtyard with machine-gun
fire that makes small mushroom clouds of white vapour burst from the
ground. And there's
still
no answering fire.

"Alpha secure," someone grunts in my headphones.
Then: "Bravo secure. Cease fire, cease fire, we've got an empty venue."

"Empty? Confirm." It's Alan's voice. He doesn't
sound perturbed, but—

"Alpha here, the place is
empty
,"
insists whoever's using that call sign. "As in abandoned."

"Bravo confirms, Mike here. There's a dead truck
in the courtyard but no sign of life up here. Dunno about the central
target, but if they've retreated in there they aren't coming out. They
wouldn't have heard us, anyway." He sounds nervous, breathy.

"Mike, keep under cover, don't assume anything.
Hammer, close in fast and secure the gatehouse. Chaitin, lay on the
central blockhouse but hold fire on my word. Charlie team move in."

Alan stands up and runs forward, crouching close
to the ground; across the landscape I can see the
others moving toward the castle's shattered gates—popping up and
lunging forward for a few seconds then diving flat to the ground, ready
to fire.

Still nothing happens.
What's going on?
I wonder. Only one way to find out: I stand up and jog forward heavily,
feeling the backpack ramming my feet down onto the frozen ground. The
empty killing apron is about a hundred metres wide and I feel really
naked as I step out onto it, out of the cover of the petrified forest.
But there's no sign of life in the castle. Nothing at all untoward
happens as I trot forward and, panting, heave myself into the shadow of
the gatehouse.

It looms overhead, a grey mound of concrete or
stone in the darkness; a narrow window, dark as the crypt, overlooks
the entranceway. The gates are solid slabs of wood bound in metal, but
they lean drunkenly away from the huge hole that the Dragon blew
between them. I pause, and someone whacks me in the back: "Howard, get
down
!"

I get down and feel icy cold through the thick
padding on my knees and elbows. There's some radio chatter: terse
announcements as each team makes its way through a series of
checkpoints. "Chaitin, keep the blockhouse covered. Hutter, any signs
of life?"

"Hutter: nothing, boss. Blockhouse is warm, but
nothing's moving outside it. Uh, correction. I have a temperature fix
on the courtyard; it's a couple of degrees warmer than outside.
Probably heat from the blockhouse." The blockhouse is glowing brightly
on infrared, a surer sign of life than anything else we've seen.

I edge through the tunnel under the walls—rammed
earth overhead, frozen like cement—and peer round the corner at the
blockhouse. The name doesn't do it justice; it's the central building
in the complex and it's built like a small castle. Windows, high up,
big dome erupting from the roof, small doors shut tight against the
chill. Some kind of small vehicle, like a weird cross between a tank
and a motorbike, is parked against the wall,
dusty with a sprinkling that isn't snow.

"Cool, I always wanted a Kettenkrad," someone
remarks on the common channel.

"Morris, shut the fuck up; the cylinder heads
are probably vacuum welded anyway. Chaitin, check out the doors. Scary
Spice, cover with the M40."

Someone who doesn't look at all like one of the
Spice Girls moves up beside me and levels something that looks like a
drainpipe fucking a submachine gun at the blockhouse. Someone else,
anonymous in winter camouflaged pressure gear, jogs forward and then
dashes at the door. Bazooka man whacks me on the shoulder to get my
attention: "Get back!" he hisses.

"Okay, I'm back," I say. Funnily enough I don't
feel afraid at all, which surprises me. "Say, are you sure this isn't
Castle Wolfenstein?"

"Fuckin' dinna say that else ye can live with
the fuckin' consequences," someone rumbles in my ears. Soldier #1
raises something that looks like a plumber's caulking gun and squirts
white paste around the frame of the blockhouse door. Still no sign of a
welcoming committee. I glance up at the hostile red stars above the
battlements and wonder why I can't see very many of them. A thought
strikes me just as the guy with the plumber's mate sticks a timer into
the goop and bounds back our way then crouches: "Cover!" The ground
bounces and smoke and gas puffs out from the edges of the door—the
gunk
is a high-brisance explosive and it cuts through the reinforced steel
door like a blowtorch through butter. I see the door getting bigger and
beginning to squash vertically—then it slams past us and the escaping
gush of air bowls me right over and nearly rolls me along the frigid
ground.

"Jesus,"
someone says, and I turn round
to see where the door landed behind me. Something is
wrong
my
nerves are screaming—where the hell are the Ahnenerbe?
There
should
be people here,
that's what's wrong.

Scary Spice has his grenade launcher levelled on
the chamber behind the door, but the air flow has stopped and when
Chaitin tosses in a flare it lights up a bare, empty room the size of a
garage, with sealed doors to either side. "Spooky," I remark. "Looks
empty. Anyone home?"

The SAS aren't waiting around to find out; the
whole of Bravo team piles into the empty vestibule in a hurry and
Chaitin moves forward. More chatter: "Airlocks, this is a fucking death
trap get us in
get us in
 … "

"Castle fucking Wolfenstein, eh?" Alan remarks
in my ear, and according to my chest panel he's on a private channel. I
join him.

"Why isn't anybody here?" I ask.

"Who the fuck knows? Let's just get inside,
fast. You got any ideas?"