The Atrocity Archives (28 page)

A burst of static that I just about decode as "What?" tells me that
the interference is worse than before; I glance
up and see red stars, a dull red swirl of galaxy
overhead … a distinct pink tinge to the moon, in
fact.

I point at where the Kettenkrad was parked. "There, it's gone," I
say. "Who took it?"

Chaitin shrugs. I look round. "Go there." He
points at the main gatehouse. I start walking. The moonlight is dim,
rosy: either I'm reeling lightheaded or … or what?

It's about a kilometre to the wall where our
unseen enemy opened the gate to Amsterdam, and with no sign of him in
the vicinity I have time to do a little bit of thinking. Looking
straight up I see only darkness; the visible stars mostly stretched in
a wide belt above the horizon, the moon an evil-faced icon staring down
at us. The power to suck all the life and heat out of a planet like
this—it's horrifying. While a sacrificial murder will get you a
hot-line to a demon capable of possessing you, or a window to some
universe so alien you can't comprehend its physical laws, it takes a
lot of power to open a physical gate to another version of the Earth.
Shadow Earths interfere with each other, and it's very difficult to
generate congruence. But whatever happened here … 

I try to picture what might have happened. I can
only come up with two scenarios:

Scenario one. An Ahnenerbe detachment in
Germany, some time in April of 1945. They know they're losing, but
defeat is not an acceptable option to them. They quickly gather all the
supplies they can: foodstuffs, machine tools, seeds, fuel. Using a
handful of captured enemy POWs, a gate is opened to somewhere cold and
airless where they can wait out the hue and cry before making a break
for home.

Nope, that doesn't work. How'd they build this
fortress? Or mess with the moon?

Scenario two. A divergent history; a different
branch of our own universe, so close to our own timeline that the
energy it takes to open a full bridge between the two realities
approximates the mass-energy of the universe itself. The point of
departure, the fork in the river of time, is an invocation the
Ahnenerbe attempted late in the war—but not too late. It's an act of
necromancy so bloody that the priests of Xipe Totec would have cringed
in horror, so gruesome that Himmler would have protested. They opened a
gateway. We thought it was just a tactical move, a way to move men and
materials about without being vulnerable to Allied attack—shunt them
into another world, travel across it bypassing their enemies, then open
a gateway back to our own continuum. But what if they were doing
something more ambitious? What if they were trying to open a channel to
one of the nameless places where the infovores dwell: beings of
near-infinite cold, living in the darkened ghosts of expanded universes
that have succumbed to the ancient forces of proton decay and black
hole evaporation? Invoking Godlike powers to hold their enemies at bay,
the forces of the Red Army and the Western Allies are held in
check … 

What happened next?

Pacing through the petrified forest I can see it
as clearly as a television documentary. A wind of desolation and pain
screams out of the heart of Europe, hurling bombers from the skies like
dandelion seeds. A darkness rises in the west, a maelstrom that sucks
Zukhov's divisions in like splinters of a shattered mast sent flying in
a hurricane. The SS necromancers are exultant: their demons harrow the
Earth in stolen bodies, scouring it clean of enemy forces, eating the
souls of the
untermenschen
and spitting up their bones. Snow
falls early as
fimbulwinter
sets in, for the ice giants of
legend have returned to do the bidding of the thousand-year Reich, and
the Führer's every dream shall be made real. A pale sun
that warms
nothing gazes down across a wilderness of
ice and fire, ravaged by the triumph of the will.

They only realise how badly they'd miscalculated
some months later as the daylight hours shorten, and shorten
further—until the equinox passes, the temperature continues to fall as
the sunlight dims, and the giants cease to do their bidding.

Götterdämmerung
has come for
the
victorious Third Reich … 

Up the low rise with the wall on the other side,
I turn round and look back at the redoubt, at the last island of warmth
in a cold world that's been sucked dry. I contemplate it for a minute
or so. "Had a thought," I say aloud, and get a burst of static in
return.

I look round. Chaitin is standing farther up the
hillside; he waves at me. More static. "You there?" I ask, fiddling
with my radio controls. "Can you hear me?"

He walks toward me, brandishing something. I
focus on a coil of cable with a plug on the end, but as he approaches
the static begins to clear up. He pokes it at my chest pack but I bat
his hand away. "Speak," he says roughly.

I take a deep breath: "I need to make some
measurements. There is something very, very wrong with this whole
picture, you know? Why is it so cold? Why are our suit radios all
malfunctioning? What killed everyone in that bunker? Seems to me that
Alan needs to know. Hell!
I
need to know—it's important."

Through his suit helmet Chaitin's expression is
unreadable. "Explain."

I shiver with a sudden realisation. "Look, they
summoned something that hunkered down and sucked all the fucking energy
out of this universe, and if Alan sets off an H-bomb—what do you think
is going to happen?"

"Talk more." Chaitin offers me the cable again.

I point to my damaged chest pack, then point my
finger straight up. "Look, the stars are all reddish, and they're too
far apart. That's number one. Red shift means they're all flying away
from each other like crazy! That, or the
energy in the light they're emitting is being sapped by something. I
figure that effect is also what's screwing with our radios: in this
universe the Planck constant is changing. Number two, the sun—the
sun's
gone out. It went out a few decades ago, that's why the temperature's
down to forty absolute and dropping; the only thing keeping the Earth
above cosmic background temperature is the fact that it's a honking
great reservoir of hot rocks, with enough thorium and uranium mixed in
that decay heat will keep it simmering for billions of years. But
that's losing energy faster than it should, too, because something here
is distorting the laws of physics. Third: for all we know all the other
suns have gone out, too—the light we see from the stars is fossil
radiation, it's been travelling for years, centuries."

I take a deep breath and shift my feet. Chaitin
isn't saying anything; he's just looking around, looking for signs in
the sky or the earth. "Something is eating energy, and information," I
say. "Our primary objective—in coming here—is to find out what's
going
on and report back. I'm saying we haven't found out yet, and what the
captain doesn't know can hurt us all."

Chaitin turns back to face me.

"It makes sense, doesn't it?" I say. "Like, it
all hangs together?"

He holds up a torch to illuminate his face
through his visor. He's grinning at me with a face I haven't seen
before:
"Sehr gut,"
he says, then he drops the torch, releases
the catches, and lifts his helmet off. Luminous worms of light writhe
soundlessly behind his eyelids, twisting in the empty space of his
skull, just like the thing that took Fred from Accounting. The
out-gassing air from his suit wreathes him in vapour as he leans toward
me, grabbing, trying to make a close flesh-to-flesh contact seeing as
his comms-cable gambit has failed. Just one moment of electrical
conduction—

The thing that occupies Chaitin's skin and bone
is not very intelligent: it's forgotten that I'm wearing a suit, too,
and that these suits are designed to take a fair bit
of abuse. Still, it's pretty freaky. I drop my sack and hop backward,
nearly going arse-over-ears as gravity seems to suck at my backpack.
The possessed body scrabbles toward me and I can see, very clearly, a
trickle of blood bubbling from his nose as I fumble for the basilisk
gun at my waist, grab onto it with both hands, and punch both red
buttons with my thumbs. For a panicky moment I think that it's dead,
batteries drained by the chilling cold out here—then all hell breaks
loose.

Roughly one in a thousand carbon nuclei in the
body that used to belong to Chaitin spontaneously acquire an extra
eight protons and seven or eight neutrons. The mass deficit is bad
enough—there's about as much energy coming out of nowhere as a small
nuke would put out—but I'll leave that to the cosmologists. What's bad
is that each of those nuclei is missing a whopping eight electrons, so
it forms a wildly unstable carbosilicate intermediary that promptly
grabs a shitload of charge out of the nearest electron donor molecules.
Then it destabilizes for real, but in the process it's set off a
cascade of tiny little acid/base reactions throughout the surrounding
hot chemical soup that used to be a human body. Chaitin's body turns
red, the kind of dull red of an electric heating element—then it
steams
,
bits of his kit melting as his skin turns black and splits open. He
begins to topple toward me and I yell and jump away. When he hits the
ground he shatters, like a statue made of hot glass.

The next thing I know I'm on my knees on the
frozen ground, breathing deeply and trying desperately to tell my
stomach to be still. I can't afford to throw up because if I vomit in
my face mask I will die, and then I won't be able to tell Alan what
kind of mistake he'll be making if he sets off the demolition charge.

This whole world has been turned into a
mousetrap: a body-snatching demon, patient and prepared, waiting for us
little furry folk with beady black eyes to stick our curious noses
inside.

I pick myself up, watching the steamy vapour
pour from the ground around the molten depressions my kneepads melted
in the permafrost as I take more deep, laborious breaths. Static ebbs
and flows in my ears like bacon frying, the distorted sidebands of a
transmission counting down the minutes to the artificial sunrise. I try
not to look at what's left of Chaitin.

They summoned an infovore: something that eats
energy and minds. A thing—I don't know what sort—from a dead cosmos,
one where the stars had long since guttered into darkness and
evaporated on a cold wind of decaying protons, the black holes
dwindling into superstring-sized knots on a gust of Hawking radiation.
A vast, ancient, slow thinker that wanted access to the hot core of a
youthful universe, one mere billions of years from the Big Bang, poised
for a hundred trillion years of profligate star-burning before the long
slide into the abyss.

On my feet now, I check my air supply: good for
two and a quarter hours. That will see me through—the bomb's going to
blow in just over an hour. I look round, trying to work out which way
to go. Thoughts are clamouring in my head, divergent priorities—

The thing was hungry. First it did what it was
invited to do, sucked the minds and life from the Ahnenerbe's enemies,
occupied their bodies, and learned how to pass for human. Then it
pulled more of itself through the gate than they'd expected. It's
big—far too big to fit through a man-sized gate—but it had access to
all the energy it wanted, and all the minds to sacrifice, more than
enough power to force it wide open and squirm through into this new,
rich cosmos.

The monster they summoned gave the Ahnenerbe
more than they asked for. As well as damping the fusion phoenix at the
heart of every star, it started to drain energy directly out of
spacetime, messing with the Planck constant, feeding on the false
vacuum of space itself. Light stretched, grew redder; the gravitational
constant became a variable, dropping like a
barometer before a storm. Fusion processes in the sun guttered and
died, neutrons and protons remaining stubbornly monogamous. The solar
neutrino flux disappeared first, though it would take centuries for the
sun itself to show signs of cooling, for the radiation-impeded
gravitational collapse to a white dwarf core to resume. Meanwhile, the
universe began to expand again, prematurely ageing by aeons in a matter
of years.

Back to the here-and-now. Here I am with a
corpse. And a gun. And the corpse manifestly killed using the gun in my
hands.
Shit.
I twiddle the squelch on my radio but get nothing
but loud hissing and incoherent bursts of static. What am I going to
tell Alan—"Look, I know I appear to have shot one of your men, but
you've got to abort the mission"?

I glance up at the sky. It's night, but maybe
the sun would be visible if I knew where to look. Visible—and
shrunken,
farther away than it is back home, for as the creature sucks energy out
of spacetime, space itself is getting bigger, and emptier. Losing
energy.
Find Alan. Stop the bomb. Get everybody out fast.
It
took a lot of energy for the thing to fully open the gate to its
original home and bring itself through to this shattered Earth; energy
that is no longer available in this drained husk of a universe, energy
that it needs if it's to move on to pastures new. About all it's
capable of on its own right now was to listen for an invitation—from
the terror cell in Santa Cruz—and answer their call. What will it do
if
we dump more energy into it? Open a gate back to its original home?
Expand the gate to
our
Earth? There's a worst-possible-case
scenario here that I don't even want to think about—I'm going to have
nightmares about it for years,
if
I have any years ahead of me
to have nightmares in.

Having dragged its huge, cold presence through
to squat in the ruins of the victorious Reich, it settled down to wait:
patient, for it has waited for an infinity of infinities already,
waiting for a hot, fast thinker to open the gate to the next universe.
Focussed in one place, it will be able to move far faster
this time—no need for a sacrifice of millions to get its attention.
Once invited—by the clever stupidity of a terrorist cell, perhaps—it
can take possession of a body and, using what it has learned of the
nature of humanity from the Ahnenerbe-SS, manipulate those around it.
The possessed, its agent on the other side of that first gate, must
arrange to open a connection, then find an energy source to crack it
wide open, big enough to admit the rest of the eater. Opening a gate
wide enough for a human body, with an agent at both ends, would take
about as much energy as it had left—the lives of all the remaining
Ahnenerbe-SS survivors in this world, hoarded against such an eventual
need. But to open a gate so that it can admit an ice giant—a being big
enough to carve monuments on the moon and suck dry a universe—will
take
much more energy: energy gained from either a major act of necromancy
or a singularly powerful local source.