The Atrocity Archives (24 page)

"How much damage will a stubby shotgun do?" Pike
responds. "Enough. Silicon-hydrogen bonds aren't stable. Don't point it
at anyone and don't switch it on and
most of all don't hit the
OBSERVE
button
unless I tell you to. Which I won't, unless you are very, very unlucky.
Or unless you decide to blow your feet off by accident, which is your
own lookout."

"Understood." I switch off the viewfinder and
power down both cameras then gingerly put the gadget down. "You aren't
expecting trouble by any chance?"

Pike stares at me. "No, it's my job to see that
you don't get into trouble," he says. I take a second to recognise the
expression: he's wondering if I'm going to be a liability.

"Tell me what to do and I'll do it," I say. "You're the expert on
this."

"Am I?" He looks sceptical. "You're the occult
specialist, you tell me what we're up against." He bends down, picks
up
a rebreather regulator, begins stripping off the insulation panels in
an absent-minded sort of way. "I mean it. What are you expecting to
find on the other side of this gate?"

Something clicks in my mind: "You've gone
through gates before, right?"

He glances at me. "Maybe. Maybe not." I realise
that he isn't looking at the rebreather as he strips it: he's got it
down to a set of motions he can run through in total darkness. Then it
hits me: I'm going to be hopelessly dependent on these guys for just
about everything more challenging than breathing. Liability, me? Maybe
I don't know what I'm getting myself into after all. But it's a bit
late to back out now.

"Well." I lick my suddenly dry lips. "This one,
we
hope
the only things waiting for us are a bunch of
superannuated Nazis who've kidnapped one of our scientists. Trouble is,
this bunch sent someone through to California, and London, and maybe to
Rotterdam, who isn't too superannuated to be banging heads. So I'll
take a rain check on the predictions, if you don't mind—expect the
worst and hope you're disappointed."

"Indeed." His tone is dry as he adds, "I love
these bastard colostomy-fucking reconnaissance jobs, I really do."

They force me to catch a
couple or three hours sleep by sticking a needle full of
phenobarbitone into my left arm and making me count backward from ten.
I never make it past five; then there's a pain in my other arm and Pike
is shaking my shoulder. "Wake up," he says. "Briefing in five minutes,
action in half an hour."

"Euurgh," I say, or something equally coherent.
He passes me a mug full of something that might be mislabelled as
coffee and I sit up and try to drink it while he disposes of the used
antidote syrette. I have a vague memory of dreams: eyes with luminous
worms swimming in them, eyes like a friendly death staring at me across
an electrodynamic summoning trap. I shudder as a little rat-faced guy
sits down opposite me and opens up a zippered and incongruously
expensive-looking golf bag.

Pike takes it upon himself to introduce us. "Bob, this is
Lance-Corporal Blevins. Roland, this is Bob Howard, a
Laundry necromancer."

Rat-face looks at me and grins, baring
unfeasibly large and yellow incisors. "Pleased ter meet yer," he says,
pulling an iron out of his golf bag—one with telescopic sights and
thick foam insulation over most of the visible surfaces.
Vacuum-adapted, I realise: these guys
have
been exploring gates
before. "Allus nice ter 'ave a bit of animal with us."

"Animal?"

"Magic," Pike explains. "Listen, you stay close
to me or Roland unless I tell you otherwise. He's the squadron backup:
what this means is, he'll either be in the rear or deployed to cover a
quick in-and-out. He'll park you somewhere safe and keep an eyeball on
you if I'm too busy to nursemaid."

"Diamond geezer, mate," Blevins says, winking
horribly, then he pulls out a bunch of jeweller's screwdrivers and goes
to work on his gun, fiddling with the sights.

What I think is,
You guys really know how to
make someone feel wanted,
but I end up saying
nothing because, once I get my ego out of the way, Pike is right. I am
not a soldier, I know nothing about what to do and what not to do, and
I'm not even in good physical condition. Fundamentally, I guess I am a
liability to these guys, except for my specialist expertise. It's not a
very pleasant thought, but they're not going out of their way to rub it
in, so the least I can do is be polite. And hope Mo is all right.

"Wot you fink I should load up on?" Roland asks. "I got silver
bullets in seven point sixty-two, but they tend to tumble
in low pressure regimes like wot's on the other side of this gate—"

"Briefing first," Pike says. "Let's go."

The hotel bar is barely recognisable.
Scaffolding and jacks in every corner support a protective raft just
under the ceiling; there's a nest of wiring and monitors on the bar
top, and some sort of stair-climbing robot camera waiting just inside
the doorway. Alan—Captain Barnes—is waiting next to a woman who's
sort
of slumped all over the robot's control panel, muttering to it and
twiddling a circuit tester in a meaningful way. A dozen other men in
pressure suits and camouflage overalls are leaning against the walls or
sitting down: half of them have backpacks and full face-covering
helmets to hand, but there's a surprising shortage of guns and I'm the
only one in the room without a notepad—until I pull out my palmtop,
which I've been carrying in a pocket more or less continuously since I
was ejected from my bedroom.

There's not much idle chatter: the mood in the
room is pretty sombre, and Alan gets down to business at once, like a
headmaster conducting a staff meeting. "The situation we're facing is
an open gate, class four, with unknown—but undesirable—parties on the
other side. They've snatched one of our scientists. A secondary mission
goal is to get her back alive. But the primary goal is to identify the
parties responsible and, if they are who we think they are, neutralise
them and then withdraw, ensuring the gate closes behind us. Let me
stress that we are not 100 percent
certain who we're up against, so identification and threat
characterisation are our first tasks. This isn't as clear-cut a job as
we'd like, so I want you all to focus on it and give it a bit of
thought. First, the situation. Derek?"

Derek from the Laundry, Derek the dried-up old
accountancy clerk, stands up and delivers a terse, comprehensive sitrep
as if he's done it a thousand times before. Who'd have thought it?
"Ahnenerbe werewolf colony left over from Himmler's last stand."
Mumble. "Mukhabarat." Cough. "Republican guard." Mutter. "Kidnapped
scientist." Mumble. I don't need to take notes; near as I can tell
I've
heard it all before. Glancing round I try to catch Angleton's eye—just
in time to see him slipping out the back. Then Derek finishes. "Back to
you, Captain."

"Our mission is to take a look on the other side
of the hill," says Alan. "Bringing back kidnapped scientists and
neutralising undesirables are tactical tasks, but our number one
strategic priority is to do a full threat evaluation and ensure word
gets back home. So, step one is to send through a crawler and make sure
there isn't a welcome party waiting for us on the other side. If it's
clear, we insert. Step two"—he pauses—"we secure the other side,
emplace the demolition package in case things go to pieces on us, then
improvise depending on what we find." He grins, briefly. "I love
surprises. Don't you?"

Well, yes, otherwise I'd never have volunteered
for active duty in the first place. Which is why, half an hour later, I
find myself standing on a purple-painted hotel staircase beneath a
portrait of Martin Heidegger, breathing through an oxygen mask and
waiting to follow a dumpy little tracked robot, half a platoon of
territorial SAS, and an armed hydrogen bomb through a rip in the
spacetime continuum.

Blurred shadows dance across
the video screen, grey and black textures like ripped velvet
laid over volcanic ash. On the floor in front of
my feet the coil of cable unspools, snaking into darkness. Hutter, the
equipment tech with the control panel, is hunched over it like a video
game addict, twitching her joystick with gloved hands. I lean over
behind Alan, who has the ringside view; I have to lean because the
backpack is a solid mass, thirty kilograms pushing me forward if I even
think about relaxing.

"One metre forward; now pan left."

The screen jerks. There's a thin wail as air
vents through the doorframe and the cable reels out, then the scenery
on screen begins to rotate. We see more blurred grey rubble, then a
view that swoops away, down to a distant sea. As the camera pans round
further the back of the robot comes into view, trailing a white
umbilical back into the incongruous side of a wall. There isn't enough
light to examine the wall, or enough scan lines: it's a night-vision
camera, but we're operating in starlight. The camera continues to
rotate until it's pointing back to its original bearing. There is no
sign of life.

"Looks clear," someone whispers in my ear, voice
tinny and half-masked by static.

"If you want to go first, feel free to
volunteer," Alan says dryly. "Mary. See any hot spots?"

"Nothing," the tech reports.

"Okay. Bearing zero six zero, forward ten or
until you see anything, then halt and report."

She follows through and the little robot lurches
forward into the grey and black landscape on the other side of the
gate. "Ambient air pressure, ten pascals. Ambient
temperature—thermocouple gives an error, FLIR is flat lined, but that
backup sensor is claiming somewhere between forty-five and sixty
Kelvin. Gravimetric—it's Earth-like. Uh, I'm worried about the power,
boss. Battery load is normal, but we're losing power like crazy—I
think
it's in danger of freezing solid. We never designed a robot to do this
kind of environment—it's colder than summer on Pluto."

Someone whistles tunelessly until Pike tells
them to shut up.

"How does this affect our environment model?"
Alan asks aloud. "The suits are only certified down to a hundred and
twenty Kelvin."

Someone else clears their throat. "Donaldson
here. I think we should be okay, sir. We're only going to be in contact
with the ground via the feet, and we've got plenty of insulation—and
heating—there. No air means no convective loss, and we're not going to
radiate any faster just because ambient is cooler. Our regulators use a
countercurrent loop to warm incoming air from whatever we breathe out,
so they're not in danger of icing up. The real risk is that we're going
to be more visible on infrared, and if we get into a firefight and have
to take cover we are going to get frostbitten so fast it isn't funny.
That lake is probably liquid nitrogen—don't walk on any shiny blue
ice,
it'll be frozen oxygen and the heat from your feet will flash-boil it.
Oh, and it's diamagnetic: your compasses won't work."

"Thank you for that reminder, Jimmy," says Alan. "Any more
compelling insights into why the laws of physics are not our
friends?"

The camera pans round: same landscape, but now
we see the gate framed by a low mound of dirt heaped up on one side,
and a broken-down wall on the other. The lake is clearer, and some sort
of rectilinear structure is just visible over the crest of the ridge.

"I don't understand the temperature," Donaldson
says pensively. "There's something about it I can't quite put my finger
on."

"Well, you're going to get a chance to put your
finger on it quite soon. Mary, still no hot spots? Good. Alpha
team—ready, insert."

On the other side of the doorway three guys
wearing dark, insulated suits and backpacks quickly duck through the
open gate and are gone from our universe. The robot's camera,
pointing backward, catches them for posterity: ghosts leaping over it
and passing out of view to either side.

"Chaitin: clear, over."

"Smith: nothing in view. Over."

"Hammer: clear, over."

The camera pans round and takes in three shapes
hunched low behind the bluff, one of them pointing a stubby pipe back
past the robot.

"Don, if you'd be so good as to take a look
round the rear of the gate. Mike, Bravo team insert."

Three anonymous bulky figures push past behind
me, through the pressure doors erected in front of the hotel room: a
gust of wind howls past my helmet as they enter the gate. The camera
pans—

"Chaitin: nothing behind the gate. Landscape is
clear, rising to hills in the middle distance. I see some kind of
geometric inscription on the ground and one, no, two bodies. Male,
naked, gutted with a sharp implement. They look to be
frozen—handcuffed
behind their backs."

My heart flops over and I begin to breathe
again, ashamed but relieved that neither of them is Mo. "Howard here:
that'll be the human sacrifices they used to open the gate," I say.
"Is
there a kind of metal tripod nearby with an upturned dish on top?"

"Chaitin: nope, somebody's cleaned up around
here."

"Bloody typical," somebody mutters out of turn.

"Charlie, insert," says Andy. He taps me on the
arm: "C'mon, Bob. Time to party."

Ahead of us, Pike picks up the controls on
something that looks like an electric street cleaner—the kind of
wheeled cart you walk behind—and drives it forward toward the doors.
It
nudges through and the gale almost sucks me forward; I follow in his
wake, trying not to think about the cart's payload. You can make a
critical mass out of about six kilos of plutonium, but you need various
other bits and pieces to make a bomb; while they've been fitted inside
an eight-inch artillery shell before now, nobody has yet built a nuke
that you can carry easily—especially when
you're wearing a thirty-kilo life-support backpack.