The Atrocity Archives Read online

  "So the bureaucratic infighting goes that far back?"

  "Guess so." I take a sip of beer. "But the Laundry survived more or less intact after the rest of SOE was gutted, like the way GCHQ survived even though the Bletchley Park operation was wound up. Only more secretively." Hmm. This is not stuff we should be talking about in public; I pull out my palmtop and tap away at it until a rather useful utility shows up.

  "What's that?" she asks interestedly, as the background clatter and racket diminishes to a haze of white noise.

  "Laundry-issue palmtop. Looks like an ordinary Palm Pilot, doesn't it? But the secret's in the software and the rather unusual daughterboard soldered inside the case."

  "No, I mean the noise–it isn't just my ears, is it?"

  "No, it's magic."

  "Magic! But–" She glares at me. "You're not kidding, are you? What the hell is going on around here?"

  I look at her blankly: "Nobody told you?"

  "Magic!" She looks disgusted.

  "Well okay, then, it's applied mathematics. I thought you said you're not a Platonist? You should be. These boxes"–I tap the palmtop–"are the most powerful mathematical tools we've developed. Things were done on an ad-hoc basis until about 1953, when Turing came up with his final theorem; since then, we've been putting magic on a systematic basis, on the QT. Most of it boils down to the application of Kaluza-Klein theory in a Linde universe constrained by an information conservation rule, or so they tell me when I ask. When we carry out a computation it has side effects that leak through some kind of channel underlying the structure of the Cosmos. Out there in the multiverse there are listeners; sometimes we can coerce them into opening gates. Small gates we can transfer minds through, or big gates we can move objects through. Even really huge gates, big enough to take something huge and unpleasant–some of the listeners are big. Giants. Sometimes we can invoke local reversals or enhancements of entropy; that's what I'm doing right now with the sound damper field, fuzzing the air around us, which is already pretty random. That's basically the business the Laundry is in."

  "Ah." She chews her lower lip for a moment, appraising me. "So that's why you were so interested in me. Say, do you have any references for this work of Turing's? I'd like to read up on it."

  "It's classified, but–"

  "Wtyjdfshjwrtha rssradth aeywerg?"

  I turn and look at the waitress who's beaming at me inscrutably. " 'Scuse me." I tap the "pause" button on screen. "What was that again?"

  "I said, are you ready to order yet?"

  I shrug at Mo, she nods, and we order. The waitron skids off and I tap the "pause" button again. "I didn't originally volunteer for the Laundry," I feel compelled to add. "They drafted me much the same way they drafted you. On the one hand, it sucks. On the other hand, the alternatives are a whole lot worse."

  She looks angry now. "What do you mean, worse?"

  "Well"–I lean back–"for starters, your work on probability engineering. You probably thought it was mostly irrelevant, except to theoretical types like Pentagon strategic planners. But if we mix it up with a localised entropy inversion we can make life very hot for whoever or whatever is on the receiving end. I'm not clear on the details, but apparently it's at the root of one particularly weird directed invocation: if we can set up a gauge field for probability metrics we can tune in on specific EIs fairly–"

  "EIs?"

  "External Intelligences. What the mediaeval magic types called demons, gods, spirits, what have you. Sentient aliens, basically, from those cosmological domains where the anthropic principle predominates and some sort of sapient creatures have evolved. Some of them are strongly superhuman, others are dumb as a stump from our perspective. What counts is that they can be coerced, sometimes, into doing what people want. Some of them can also open wormholes–yes, they've got access to negative matter–and send themselves, or other entities, through. As I understand it, general indeterminacy theory lets us target them very accurately: it's the difference between dialling a phone number at random and using a phone book. I think."

  A crescent-shaped plate of gyoza appears on the table between us, and for a couple of minutes we're busy eating; then bowls of soup arrive and I'm busy juggling chopsticks, spoon, and noodles that are making a bid for freedom.

  "So." She drains her bowl, lays the chopsticks across it, and sits up to watch me. "Let's summarise. I've stumbled across a research field that's about as critical to your–the Laundry–as if I'd been working on nuclear weapons research without realising it. In this country, everyone who works on this stuff works for the Laundry, or not at all. So the Laundry has sucked me in and you're here to give me an update so I know what I'm swimming in."

  "Other people's dirty underwear, mostly," I say apologetically.

  "Yeah, right. And this concern for keeping me updated was all your own idea too, huh? Just what the hell was going on in Santa Cruz? Who were those guys who snatched me, and what were you doing?"

  "I won't say I wasn't asked to have a discreet chat with you." I put my spoon down, then turn it over. Then over again. "Look, the Laundry is first and foremost a self-perpetuating bureaucracy, like any other government agency, right? SOP, when shit hits the fan in the field, is to protect head office by pulling back feelers." I turn the spoon over. "When I got home I was carpeted for going after you–given a going over in front of my boss."

  "You were what?" Her eyes widen. "I don't remember you–"

  I pull a face. "Standard protocol if something goes down is to get the hell out of town, Mo. But you were obviously in over your head when you rang, so I went round your place and followed you to that safe house they were holding you in. Phoned your mobile, expecting a diversion tap, and the next thing I knew I was sitting up in hospital with a hangover and no alcohol to show for it, being grilled by the Feds. Very clever of me, but at least they pulled us both out alive. Anyway, when I got home it turned out that officially none of that shit happened. You were not abducted by, ahem, Middle Eastern gentlemen who might or might not have been working for a guy called Tariq Nassir, with connections to Yusuf Qaradawi. You were not being kept under surveillance by the Black Chamber. Because if either of those things were true, it would be Bad, and if it was Bad, it would put a black mark on my boss's record book. And she wants her KCMG and DBE so bad you can smell it when she walks in the door."

  Mo is silent for a while. "I had no idea," she says presently. There's a slightly wild look in her eyes: "They were talking about killing me! I heard them!"

  "Officially it didn't happen, but unofficially–Bridget isn't the only poker player in the Laundry." I shrug. "One of the other players wants to hear your side of the story, off the record." I glance round. "This is not the place for it. Even with a fuzzbox."

  "I–huh." She checks her watch. "An hour to go. Look, Bob. If you've got time to come back to my place for a coffee before I turf you out, we should talk some more." She looks at me warningly: "I'm going to have to kick you out at nine-thirty, though. Got a date."

  "Well okay." I don't think I show any sign of guilty disappointment–or relief that I won't have an opportunity to outscore Mhari at her own game this once. Besides which, I think Mo is too nice to play that kind of dirty trick on. I raise a hand and a waiter zips over, swipes my credit card through her handheld, and wishes me a nice day.

  We head over to Mo's place and I get a bit of a surprise; she's renting a flat in a centralish part of Putney, all wine bars and bistros. We catch the tube over and end up walking downstairs from an overhead platform: you know you're entering suburbia when the underground trains poke their noses up into the open air. She walks very fast, forcing me to hurry to keep up. "Not far," she remarks, "just round a couple of corners from the tube stop."

  She marches up a leaf-messed street in near darkness, hemmed in to either side by parked cars, everything washed out by orange sodium lights. I can feel the first chilly fingers of autumn in the air. "It's up here," she says, gesturing at a front door set b
ack from the road, with a row of buzzers next to it. "Just a sec. I'm on the third floor, by the way; I've got the attic." She fumbles with a key in the lock and the door swings open on a darkened vestibule as the skin on the back of my neck begins to prickle, while the sound goes flat and the light deadens.

  "Wait–" I begin to say, and something uncoils from the shadows and lashes out at Mo with a noise like an explosion in a cat factory.

  She barely makes a noise as it grabs her with about a dozen tentacles–no suckers here–and yanks her into the darkened vestibule. I scream, "Shit!" and jump back, then yank at my belt where I happen to have clipped my multitool: the three-inch blade flips out and locks as I fumble around the inside of the door for a light switch, left-handed, holding the knife in front of me.

  Now I hear a muffled squeaking noise–Mo is on the floor up against an inner doorway, screaming her head off. What looks like a nest of pythons has wriggled under the woodwork and is trying to drag her in by the neck. But whatever field is damping my hearing is also stifling her cries, and the thing has got her arms and torso. Behind her, the door is bulging; the light from the bulb overhead is attenuated to a dull, candlelike flicker.

  I step back, yank out my mobile phone, and hit a quick-dial button, then throw it into the roadway outside. Then I take a deep breath and force myself to go back inside.

  "Get it off me!" she mouths, thrashing around. I lean over her and try sawing at one of the tentacles. It's dry and leathery and squirms underneath the blade, so I jab the point of the knife into it and force my weight down.

  The thing on the other side of the door goes apeshit: a banging and crashing resounds through the floor as if something huge is trying to break down the wall. The tentacles around Mo tighten until her mouth opens and I'm terrified she's going to turn blue. Something black begins to ooze out around my knife so I concentrate on ramming the thing down against the floor and slicing from side to side. It feels as if I'm trying to skewer a rubber band big enough to power a wind-up freight locomotive.

  Mo thrashes around until her back is against the door; her eyes roll and I give a desperate yank on the tentacle with my free hand. The pain is indescribable: it feels like I've just grabbed hold of a mass of razor blades. Something black and oily is squirting out around the knife blade and I try to keep my hand out of it. How long is it going to take Capital Laundry Services to answer the sodding phone and get a Plumber out here? Too fucking long–a quarter of an hour at least. Maybe I can do something else–

  A steel vice closes around my left ankle and yanks my shin against the doorframe so hard I scream and drop the knife. Another one wraps around my waist like an animated hawser and constricts violently. Mo valiantly lends a hand and succeeds in elbowing me under the chin: I see stars for a second or two and fumble around with a left hand that feels like a lump of raw meat for that dropped multitool. There's got to be a better way. If I've remembered my Gadget Man cigarette lighter . . . I reach into my pocket and, instead, find my palmtop. Illumination dawns.

  The light of its display is a mycoid green glow in the darkness. A thousand miles away something is roaring at me. Icons shimmer, hovering above the screen. I thumb one of them, an ear with a red line through it, smearing blood across the glass as I cut in the anti-sound field and pray that it works.

  Chapter 5

  OGRE REALITY

  I wake up to discover my back feels as if the All Blacks have been performing a victory dance on it, my ankle's been turned on a lathe, and my left hand worked over with a steak tenderiser. I open my eyes; I'm lying on the floor, legs stretched out, and Mo is leaning over me. "Are you all right?" she asks, in a ragged voice.

  "Death shouldn't hurt like this," I croak. I blink painfully and wonder what the hell happened to her shirt–it looks as if it's been used as a nest by a family of hungry ferrets. "It had you for longer–"

  "Once you began hacking at it," she begins, then pauses to clear her throat. "It let go. Think you can stand up? You turned that gadget on and the thing just vanished. Whipped back under the door and sort of faded out. Turned translucent and–went away."

  I look round. I'm lying in a sticky black puddle of something that isn't blood, thankfully–or, at least, not human blood. The light is normal for a dingy vestibule with an energy-saver bulb, and the tentacles have gone from the walls. "My phone," I say, pushing my back up against the wall. "I threw it out–"

  Mo heaves herself upright and staggers to the front door, bends down and picks something up delicately. "You mean this?"

  She drops it beside me, in about three separate pieces.

  "Fuck. That was meant to call the Plumbers."

  "Come upstairs, you'd better explain." She pauses. "If you think it's safe?"

  I try to laugh but a vicious stabbing pain in my ribs stops me. "I don't think that thing will be coming back any time soon: I fuzzed its eigenvector but good."

  She unlocks the inner door and we stumble up three flights of stairs, then she opens another door and I somehow end up slumped across another overstuffed sofa from the Planet of the Landlords, gasping with pain. She double-locks and deadbolts the door then flops into an armchair opposite me. "What the hell was that?" she asks, rubbing her throat.

  "That was what we call in the trade an Unscheduled Reality Excursion, usually abbreviated to 'Oh fuck.' "

  "Yes, but–"

  "What I said earlier? We live in an Everett-Wheeler cosmology, all possible parallel universes coexisting. That thing was an agent someone summoned from elsewhere to, um–"

  "Fuck with our metabolic viability," she suggests.

  "Yeah, that." I pause and take stock of my ribs, ankle, and general frame of mind. My hands are shaking slightly and I feel clammy and cold with the aftershock, but not entirely out of control. Good. "You mentioned something about coffee." I lever myself upright. "If you tell me where it is . . ."

  "Kitchen's over there." I realise there's a breakfast bar and a cramped cooking niche behind me. I shamble over, fumble for the light switches, check there's water in the kettle, and begin scooping instant out of the first available jar. Mo continues: "My neck hurts. Do you have lots of, uh, reality excursions in this line of work?"

  "That's the first I've ever had follow me home," I say truthfully. Fred the Accountant doesn't count.

  "Well I am glad to hear that." Mo stands up and goes somewhere else–bathroom, at a guess; I need the caffeine so badly that I don't really notice. While the kettle boils I root out a couple of mugs and some milk, and when I turn round she's back in the armchair wearing a clean T-shirt. I fill the mugs. "Milk, no sugar. Bathroom's behind you on the left," she adds, noncommittally.

  One splash of water on my face later I'm back on the sofa with a mug of coffee, beginning to feel a bit more human–Neanderthal, maybe.

  "What was that thing doing here?" she asks me.

  "I don't know, and I'm not sure I want to know."

  "Really?" She glares at me. "Trouble has a bad habit of following you around. First time I meet you, an hour later some Middle Eastern thugs stick me in the trunk of their car, drive me halfway round Santa Cruz, lock me in a cupboard, and gear up to sacrifice me. Second time I meet you, an hour later some random bad dream with too many tentacles ambushes me in my front hall." She pauses for a thoughtful moment. "Now granted, you seem to turn up in time to stop them, but, on the balance of prior probabilities, there appears to be a statistical correlation between you appearing in my life and horrible things happening. What's your excuse?"

  I shrug painfully. "What can I say? There seems to be a positive correlation in my life between people telling me to talk to you and horrible things happening to me. I mean, it's not as if I make a habit of letting random nightmares with too many tentacles come along on a date, is it? Parenthetically speaking," I add hastily.

  "Huh. Well then. Got any ideas as to why this is happening, Mr. Spy Guy?"

  "I am not a spy," I say, nettled, "and the answer–" is right in front of my pointy
nose if I'd bloody well focus on it, I suddenly realise.

  "Yes?" she prompts, noticing my pause.

  "Those guys who officially didn't abduct you." I take a sip of coffee and wince; I'm not used to the instant stuff she uses. "And who weren't officially talking about sacrificing you. I want you to tell me everything you didn't officially tell anyone who debriefed you. Like the whole truth."

  "What makes you think I didn't tell–" She stops.

  "Because you were afraid nobody would believe you. Because you were afraid they'd think you were a nut. Because there were no witnesses and nobody wanted to believe anything had happened to you in the first place because they'd have had to fill in too many forms in triplicate and that would be bad. Because you didn't owe the bastards anything for fucking up your life, if you'll excuse my French." I wave a hand in the general direction of the doorway. "I believe you. I know something really stinks around here. If I can figure out what it is, stopping it features high on my list of priorities. Is that enough for you?"

  Mo grimaces, a strikingly ugly expression. "What's to say?"

  "Lots. Your call: if you won't tell me what happened, I can't try and sort things out for you."

  She sips her coffee as it cools. "After we met, I went home thinking everything was going to be okay. You, or the Foreign Office, or whoever, would sort things out so I could come home. It was all just a mix-up, right? I'd get my visa sorted out and be allowed to go back home without any more problems."

  Another mouthful of coffee. "I walked back to my condo. That's one of the things I liked about UCSC: the town's small enough you can walk anywhere. You don't have to drive as long as you don't mind getting to SF being a royal pain. I was turning over a problem I'm working on, a way to integrate my probability formalism with Dempster-Shaffer logic. Anyhow, I stopped off at a convenience store to buy some stuff I was running out of and who should I run into but David? At least, I thought it was David." She frowns. "I thought he was out east, and I really didn't want to see him anyway–I mean, I'm over him. He's history."