The Apocalypse Codex lf-4 Read online

  The Apocalypse Codex

  ( Laundry Files - 4 )

  Charles Stross

  Charles Stross

  The Apocalypse Codex

  In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.

  —Dr. Laurence J. Peter, The Peter Principle

  Prologue

  OFFICE JOB

  THINGS ARE GETTING BETTER: IT’S BEEN TEN MONTHS, AND I only wake up screaming about once a week now. The physiotherapy is working and my right arm has regained eighty percent of its strength. The surviving members of the Wandsworth Cell of the Brotherhood of the Black Pharaoh have been arrested and detained indefinitely at Her Majesty’s Pleasure, in accordance with the secret supplementary regulations in Appendix Six of the Terrorism Act (2003); and every day, in every way, my life is getting better and better.

  (The happy pills help, too.)

  Please ignore the nervous tic; it’s an unavoidable side effect of my profession. The name’s Howard, Bob Howard: I’m a hacker turned demonologist, and I work for the Laundry, the secret agency tasked with protecting Her Majesty’s Realm from the scum of the multiverse. The nightmares, scars, and post-traumatic flashbacks are the fault of the bad guys, some of whom also work (or rather, worked) for the Laundry—which fact is currently causing a shit-storm of epic proportions to rage through the corridors of government.

  Ten months ago, while seconded to the BLOODY BARON committee, I stumbled across evidence of a leak inside the Laundry. That sort of thing is supposedly impossible (our oath of office supposedly binds us to service on peril of our soul) but, nevertheless, Angleton—whose assistant I am, and who is not entirely human—set a trap for the mole, with yours truly as the tethered goat.

  Things got a little out of hand, and before the dust settled the Black Brotherhood attempted to raise and bind an ancient evil called the Eater of Souls, using a ritual that required a human body for it to possess. (Guess who they had in mind for the starring role?) Luckily for me they hadn’t quite worked out that the Eater of Souls already is incarnate in a body—Angleton’s—but before the Seventh Cavalry arrived I discovered the hard way that Nietzsche was right: if you stare into the Abyss for too long it stares into you, and likely finds you crunchy with ketchup and a little relish on the side. Bad dreams ensued all around, and it left me with a disquieting new talent that I’ve been doing my best to avoid thinking about too hard.

  Well, they arrested Iris and her surviving minions and sent them to a camp in the Lake District where it rains sideways five days out of four, all technologies invented after 1933 are forbidden, and if you walk too far beyond the perimeter fence you find yourself walking back towards it. I imagine that’s where they live to this day, when they’re not answering questions in a room where the patterned carpet makes your eyes burn if you stare at it for too long, and your tongue writhes like a tapeworm in your mouth if you try to stay silent.

  As for me, I got to go home four months ago. I finished writing up my confidential report, and the nightmares have mostly stopped: I only dream about the fence of living corpses around the step pyramid on the dead plateau a couple of times a week now, and the hole in my right arm has mostly healed. So I’m all right, at least on paper.

  A month ago, I went back to work. I’m on light duty for the time being, but I’m sure that’ll change once management decides to feed me back into the meat grinder.

  BEFORE I CONTINUE, I’VE GOT A CONFESSION TO MAKE.

  A couple of years ago, Angleton told me to start writing my memoirs. Which should have struck me as really fishy—why on earth should a junior civil servant in an occult intelligence agency be required to write a memoir? (Especially as ninety percent of the stuff therein is classified up to the eyeballs and protected by wards that will make steam boil out of your ears if you try to read it without the right security clearance.) But I’m older and more cynical these days, and I understand the logic behind it.

  The deadliest threat to any covert organization is the loss of institutional knowledge that comes with the death or retirement of key personnel. The long-term survival prospects for those of us who practice the profession of applied computational demonology are not good. Let me put it another way: I’ve got a really generous pension waiting for me, if I live long enough to claim it. As we drift helplessly into the grim meat-hook future of CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, the final crisis when “the stars come right,” the walls between the worlds dissolve, and the monsters come out to play, we’re going to need more sorcerers than can be trained by conventional methods; we’re going to have to drop a lot of our existing security practices, allow the stovepipes between departments to melt, lower the firewalls, and get these sorcerers up to speed and mixing new metaphors as fast as possible. These memoirs are therefore intended to feed into an institutional knowledge base that, by and by, will help my successors (including new operations management personnel) to survive by allowing them to avoid my non-fatal blunders—blunders I only lived through because I made them in a kinder, more forgiving age.

  (Also, there is this: writing down nightmares is a really good way to exorcise your demons.)

  However, as I record this account of the events surrounding the Apocalypse Codex, I’m going to have to take some liberties. For starters, even if I’m dead when you read this, other people affected by the events in this document may still be alive—and what you learn from it may hurt them. So I’m going to have to redact some sections. Also, I’m in line management these days, and although I debriefed all the surviving participants and read all the reports, I didn’t personally witness all the action. In fact, I spent much of my time following the trail of broken bodies, explosions, and general mayhem that BASHFUL INCENDIARY left in her wake—and praying that I wouldn’t be too late.

  (Praying? Well, yes—metaphorically speaking. As you doubtless know if you’re reading this memoir, there is One True Religion; but I wouldn’t want you to get the idea that I was a follower of N’Yar lath-Hotep, or The Sleeper, or any of their nightmarish ilk. My prayers are secular, humanist, and probably futile. It’s one of my character flaws; I was a lot happier when I was an atheist.)

  Anyway, I’m going to use a simple convention in this memoir. If it happened to me, I’ll describe it in the first person, from my own point of view. If it happened to someone else, I’ll describe it in the third person, from the outside. And if there’s something you really, really need to understand if you’re to avoid having your brain eaten by gibbering monsters from beyond spacetime, I’ll take time out to harangue you directly.

  Finally, if it happened to one of us but it has the potential to be damaging if disclosed, you’ll have to come back with a higher security clearance in order to check out the version with the spicy bits.

  And so, to business.

  A MONTH LATER.

  Dear diary…

  No, scratch that. Two months ago I went back to work.

  The first month was light duty, pottering around the office, catching up on a backlog of training courses and paperwork, filling in time.

  And of course I let myself be suckered into a false sense of security, into thinking that everything was, in fact, getting better and better. Despite the nightmares and the security protocols and the ever-present awareness of the fast-approaching end of reality as we know it—I began to relax.

  Big mistake, Bob.

  A lot of things can happen in a month. In the context of the last month, I have…well, I’m not dead, even though I’ve acquired my first gray hairs. I’m not insane, or back in hospital, under arrest, or even slightly maimed. All things considered, that’s a minor miracle.

  A little light duty, filling in time. Ho bloody ho. “We want you to keep an ey
e on some departmental assets that are going walkabout,” Angleton said, as if we were talking about paper clips or rubber bands. So of course I didn’t think to ask what kind of assets he had in mind. Silly me.

  The last month’s asset-watching has been something of an eye-opener. I’ve got a whole new bundle of guilt, not to mention a bunch of secrets to see me through the sleepless nights. Assets, going walkabout. That’s a euphemism, you know, as the actress said to the bishop. Sort of like the French prime minister describing an H-bomb test as “a device which is exploding.”

  So here without further ado is my recollection of the events classified under APOCALYPSE CODEX.

  1. BLOODSTONE CAPER

  A CLEAR SPRING NIGHT OVER BAVARIA, CLOUDLESS AND CHILLY. The setting moon is a waning crescent, the shadows lengthening to the southeast. A distant propeller drone splits the sky above the foothills of the Bavarian Alps as a late-flying Cessna 208 works its way slowly northeast towards Munich. The single-engine utility plane is nearly six kilometers up as it cruises over the forested slopes of the west Allgäu.

  It’s cold and noisy in the unpressurized cabin, which is unfurnished and bare but for anchor points and tie-downs: this is nobody’s idea of business class. Nevertheless, three passengers, all with oxygen masks, crouch on the floor. One of them wears overalls, a safety harness, and a headset plugged into the crew circuit. He waits by the cargo door, listening for a word from the cockpit. The other two passengers wear helmets and parachute packs in the same color scheme as their midnight camo overalls.

  At a terse instruction from the cockpit, the jump-master leans forward and tugs the door open. As he does so, the taller and heavier of the midnight skydivers leans his helmet close to his companion’s ear and speaks. “Are you sure this is entirely safe, Duchess?”

  “Come on, Johnny! A midnight HALO drop over mountainous terrain, then a rooftop landing on a madman’s folly guarded by unholy nightmares?” Her laugh is a rich, musical chuckle. “What can possibly go wrong?”

  “It’s not that.” Her companion raises a hand, adjusts the fit of the night vision goggles that half-obscure the front of his helmet, lending him the face of a giant cubist insect. “I mean, it’s the payload. We’re getting a bit too damn close to the deadline, if you’ll pardon my French.”

  “Oh, really.” She looks out the door, at the screaming midnight gale and the invisible forest below, as one hand moves to touch the bulge at her left hip. “Yes, we are very late. Blame the ash cloud from Grímsvötn: we should have been able to do this last week. But if you think I am going to abort now, and risk landing at Franz Josef Strauss Airport with that thing still in my pocket—”

  The jump-master interrupts: “Sixty seconds.”

  “I thought you’d say that,” Johnny says gloomily.

  “Relax. Everything will be fine once it’s back in its wards. Just try not to get hung up on the battlements.”

  “Thirty seconds.”

  Johnny gives the jump-master a thumbs up and stands, holding the rail beside the open side-door. His companion rolls to her knees and tugs the strap connecting her harness to a kit bag the size of a large carry-on, then stands up behind him. Pausing, she turns to the jump-master and hands him an envelope. “For yourself and Darren,” she says, meaning the pilot. “With my undying love, Oscar.”

  “It has been a rare pleasure, Ms. Hazard.” The jump-master raises his hand. “Five seconds! Three. Two. One. Go—”

  And then he’s alone with the night and magic.

  PERSEPHONE IS FALLING INTO DARKNESS.

  Kilometers below her, the tree-shrouded slopes of the alpine foothills are growing rapidly closer. The wind is a constant roaring drag at her arms and legs as she stops her spin, then scans the grainy green disk of her night vision goggles around until she can see a light green St Andrew’s cross perhaps a hundred meters below her, and Johnny, free-falling towards the target. He begins to crab sideways, and she checks her altimeter and the compact GPS receiver on her wrist. Off course by a couple of hundred meters: Johnny has noticed and is correcting. She makes sure to keep her distance to one side. Despite her nonchalant act, she’s keyed up and apprehensive: she’d think twice before trying to pull a caper like this with anyone else.

  Nearly a minute later she’s just two thousand meters above ground level. The target is in view over the ridge line as her altimeter begins to beep. She brings her right hand in and pulls the handle. There’s the usual moment of screaming tension, then the whoosh and lung-emptying jolt as the chute opens—cleanly, no messing, excellent. The falling stone has hatched into a drifting feather, gently circling towards the ground. She reaches up and grips the rigging handles, spots Johnny’s chute. She’s fallen past him and he’s now fifty meters above her and off to the left. That’s either too damn close, or not close enough—depending on how the landing goes. She spots a hand wave. He’s aware of her position. Good.

  One thousand meters up. The target is visible, sitting proudly atop a rugged hill overlooking the Alpsee and Schwansee lakes. Schloss Neuschwanstein was the last and greatest architectural folly of Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, model for a million Disney fantasies. Today it is one of the most popular tourist attractions in Germany, with a newly opened gallery of baroque art in the lower stories below the king’s staterooms.

  From the perspective of a nighttime parachute drop, the roofline is a nightmare—steeply pitched gables surrounded by pointed conical towers, like an enormous meat tenderizer poised to slam into flesh and bones.

  Persephone focuses on the roofline, picks out the craggy pitch of the Palas with its gables and chimneys and turrets, and steers towards it.

  Sane people do not go skydiving at night. They especially don’t go skydiving at night over mountainous terrain, then try to land on the steeply angled tiles of a castle roof, with a twenty meter drop to a cobblestoned courtyard off to one side…

  …But nobody has ever accused Persephone Hazard of being sane.

  She flares and lifts her knees to clear the spine of the roof, spills air and drops towards the tiles, slides jolting sideways towards the cornice below—and is yanked to a stop by the cable attaching her harness to the peak of the roof by a specially shaped grapple. There is nothing random about the grapple: she and Johnny went to great pains to study the roof earlier, taking photographs and measurements from the Marienbrücke hillside. The grapple is locked to the roof, held in place by her weight. The chute, in contrast, drapes loosely around her. Persephone rolls, putting her back to the roof, and gathers in the chute with both arms. Thirty meters away on the other side of the roof, Johnny is doing much the same. She can see movement at the other end of the Palas, fabric sliding across tiles. Good. She relaxes infinitesimally. So far, the plan is on track.

  Five minutes pass.

  Persephone has rolled up her parachute, knotting it in its own cords, and secured it to the strap of the kit bag dangling below her. Now she begins to pay out one end of the loop of rope that runs through the eye of the grapple, lowering herself towards the edge of the roof. The nearest of the high skylights, surmounted by its own steep gable, is below her and only three meters to her left. Removing an anchor from her sling and reaching out sideways, she levers between slates, feeling for a roof timber to drive the anchor into. Working in darkness takes time: fifteen minutes pass as she crabs sideways in silence, driving anchors every meter and carefully moving her attachment away from the roofline grapple. Finally she is in position, ready to lower herself alongside the gothic arch of the window. And so she descends.

  The window is leaded, with a cast-iron frame. There are no security contacts on the glass or its surround; who would break into a castle from the rooftop? Persephone peers inside, sees no telltale shimmer of infrared LEDs. The castle security is tightly focused on the lower windows and outer approaches, and the display cabinets and paintings. Up here there’s nothing to worry about but the fire alarm. And the watchers.

  A minute later, she lowers her kit bag and t
hen herself to the parquet floor of the Hall of the Singers.

  A shadow moves swiftly in the end gallery: “What kept you?”

  “Bad positioning. Help me with this.” She kneels and begins to unpack components from the bag while Johnny assembles them. He’s still tightening bolts as Persephone removes her helmet, unfastens her harness, then unzips her coveralls. Beneath them she wears leggings and a black leotard; her dark hair is knotted in a tight chignon. She has a dancer’s physique—but a dancer would not be wearing the equipment webbing and pouches, or the mummified monkey’s hand strung on a leather cord around her neck. She puts her climbing harness back on over the leotard, dons the night vision goggles, then pulls a shoulder bag from the sack and stuffs her discarded overalls and helmet inside it.

  “Okay, I think I’m ready, Duchess.”

  Persephone checks her watch, a Seiko chronometer, synchronized to a broadcast time signal. “We are running late—ninety-six minutes to the conjunction.”

  “Shit. Well, I suppose I’d better get moving, then.”

  Johnny pulls out a pair of bent wires from his pocket and walks to the end wall. Whistling tunelessly he paces backwards, holding them before him; then, having found his distance, he switches direction and moves towards the middle of the floor. “Let’s see…just about here, I think.”

  Persephone, who is watching from the gallery, narrows her eyes. “Fifty centimeters closer to the window.”

  “If you say so, Duchess.” Johnny squats and begins to work at the parquet tiles. They form a beautifully polished herringbone pattern in rich mahogany, glued to the floorboards below with hot bitumen. With less than two hours to do the job, there’s no time for subtlety: Johnny systematically vandalizes them with the aid of a battery-powered jigsaw. First, he uses a cord to draw a circle a meter in diameter around his measurement point. Next, he carefully cuts a groove in the flooring.