The Atrocity Archives (26 page)

"Yeah. If you depressurize this building and
Mo's inside you'll have lost us our best clue yet."

"If I
don't
depressurize that building
and some fucking Nazi revenant ices my people I'll have lost more than
just our best clue." Someone taps me on the shoulder and I jump, then
turn far enough to recognise Alan. "Remember that," he says.

"We're here for information first—" I say, but
he's cut over to another channel already so I don't know if he hears
me. In any case, he taps me on the shoulder again and waves me toward
the vestibule. Where Bravo team has sprung a door with a big locking
wheel, hopped through, and the wheel is now spinning behind them.
Airlock door, at a guess.

"Bravo, Mike here, we have atmosphere—half a
kilopascal at only twenty below freezing. Pressure's coming up: lock
safety is tripped. Everything here looks to be in working order, but
dusty as hell. We're ready to go through on your word."

I follow Alan and Alpha squad into the
vestibule. Scary Spice is busy laying strips of some kind of explosive
gunk all around the airlock door, while one of the other soldiers lines
up on it with a heavily insulated light machine
gun. I flick to the main channel and listen to the crackly chatter;
something seems to be wrong with my radio because I'm picking up a lot
of noise. Noise—

"Howard here, anybody else picking up a lot of
radio hash?"

"Hutter here, who was that? Repeat please, I'm
reading you strength three and dropping."

"Hutter, Bob, cut the chatter and use your
squelch. We've got a job to do here." Alan sounds distinctly
preoccupied; I decide interrupting is a bad idea and focus instead on
my suit radio in case there's a problem with it. A minute of fiddling
tells me that there isn't. It's a really cute UHF set, able to hop
around about a zillion sidebands at high speed—analogue, not digital,
but the pinnacle of that particular technology. If it's picking up hash
then the hash is spread far and wide.

I walk back to the vestibule entrance and look
up at the sky. The stars are really prominent; the smoky red whirlpool
of the galaxy stares down at me like a malignant red eye, startlingly
visible against the night. I hunt around for the moon but it's out of
direct sight, casting knife-edged black shadows across the pale blue
snowscape. I blink, wishing I could rub my eyes.
Blue?
I must
be seeing things. Or maybe the optical filters on my helmet are
buggering my colour sensitivity—I've had it happen with computer
screens before now.

I turn back to face the interior and someone is
waving me forward; the airlock door gapes open. "Howard, Hutter, Scary,
your cycle." I move forward carefully. The concrete floor is chipped
and scarred, stained with old grease marks. I look round: something
large is inching toward the gates—Pike, and the cart with the H-bomb.
"I'll follow you through with the charge," Alan adds. I step through
into the airlock room, boggling at the array of pipework on view—it's
like something out of a war movie, the interior of a beached U-boat,
all plumbing and dials and big spinner wheels.
Hutter pushes the door closed behind us and cranks a handle. The
airlock is narrow, and dark except for our helmet lamps; I shudder, and
try not to think about what would happen if the door jams. On my other
side Scary Spice yanks a valve-lever in the opposite door, and there's
a thin hissing as fog spills into the room from vents along the floor.
A needle in my suit's chest instrument panel quivers and begins to
move—air pressure. After a few more seconds I feel my suit going limp
and clammy around me, and hear a distinct
clank
as the hissing
stops.

"Going through," says Scary Spice, and he spins
the locking wheel on the inner door and pushes it open.

I'm not sure what I am expecting to see; Castle
Wolfenstein is a definite maybe, and I was subjected to the usual run
of second-rate war movies during my misspent childhood, but the last
thing on my list would have been a kennel full of freeze-dried
Rottweilers. Someone has powered up an overhead light bulb which is
swinging crazily at the end of its cord, casting wild shadows across
the emaciated-looking corpses of a dozen huge dogs. Next to the airlock
is a table, and behind it a wall of lockers; ahead of us, a wooden door
leading onto a corridor. The light doesn't reach far into those
shadows. Hutter prods me in the back and as I step forward something
crunches under my boot heel, leaving a nasty brownish stain on the
floor. "Yuck." I look round.

"You can switch your transmitter off," says
Hutter, "we've got air." She fiddles with her suit panel: "Looks
breathable, too, but don't take my word for it."

"Quiet." Scary Spice looks round. "Mike?"

"Mike here." My radio isn't crackling as much
now we're indoors. "No signs of life so far—lots of dusty offices,
dead
dogs. We've swept the ground floor and it looks as if there's nobody
home." He sounds as puzzled as I feel. Where the hell
are
the
bad guys?

"Roger that, Hutter and yon boffin are with me
in the guardhouse. We're waiting on reinforcements."

I hear a squeal of metal and look round; Hutter
is closing the airlock door again, and it sounds like it hasn't been
oiled for fifty years.

"Uh, we have bodies." I jump; it's a different
voice, worryingly shaky. Chaitin? "I'm in the third door along on
corridor B, left wing, and it isn't pretty."

"Barnes here. Chaitin, sitrep." Alan sounds
purposeful.

"They're—looks like a mess room, boss. It's hard
to tell, temperature's subzero so everything's frozen but there's a lot
of blood. Bodies. They're wearing—yeah, SS uniforms, I'm vague on the
unit insignia but it's definitely them. Looks like they shot
themselves. Each other. O Jesus, excuse me sir, need a moment."

"Take ten, Greg. What's so bad? Talk to me."

"Must be, uh, at least twenty of them, sir.
Freeze-dried, like the doggies: they're kind of mummified. Can't have
happened recently. There's a pile against one wall and a bunch around
this table, and—one of them is still holding a pistol. Dead as they
come. There's some papers on the table."

"Papers. What can you tell me?"

"Not much sir, I don't speak German and that's
what they look to be in."

Someone swears creatively. After a moment I
realise that it's Chaitin.

"
Status
, Chaitin!"

"Just trod in—" More swearing. "Sorry, sir."
Sound of heavy breathing. "It's safe but, but anyone who comes here
better have a strong stomach. Looks like some kind of black magic—"

Hutter taps me on the shoulder and motions me
forward: "Howard coming through. Don't touch anything."

The building is a twilight nightmare of narrow
corridors, dust and debris, too narrow to turn round in easily with the
bulky suit backpacks. Scary Spice leads me through a series of rooms
and a mess hall, low benches parked to either side of a wooden table in
front of a counter on which sit pans that have
tarnished with age. Then we're into a big central hall with a staircase
leading up and down, and another corridor, this one with gaping
doors—and Chaitin waiting outside the third door with someone else
inside.

The scene is pretty much what Chaitin described:
table, filing cabinets, pile of withered mummies in grey and black
uniforms, black-brown stains across half of them. But the wall behind
the door—

"Howard here: I've seen these before," I
transmit. "Ahnenerbe-issue algemancy inductance rig. There should
be—ah." A rack of stoppered glass bottles gleams from below the thing
like a glass printing press with chromed steel teeth. There's a wizened
eyeless horror trapped in it, his jaws agape in a perpetual silent
scream, straining at manacles drawn tight by dehydrating muscle tissue.
I carefully pay no attention to it: throwing up inside a pressure suit
would be unwise. Bulldog clips and batteries and a nineteen-inch-wide
rack—where's the trough? Answer: below the blood gutters.

"One last summoning, by the look of it, before
they all died. Or shot themselves." I trace a finger along the
boundary
channel of the arcane machine, careful not to touch it: they probably
filled the channel with liquid mercury—a conductor—but it's long
since
evaporated. If it was a possession, that tends to spread by touch, or
along electrical conductors. (Visuals, too, although that usually takes
serious computer graphics work to arrange.) I turn away from the poor
bastard impaled on the torture machine and look at the table. The
papers there are brittle with age: I turn one page over, feeling the
binder crackling, and see a Ptath transform's eye-warping geometries.
"They were summoning something," I say. "I'm not sure what, but it was
definitely a possessive invocation." For some reason I have an
unaccountable sense of wrongness about the scene. What have I missed?

The mummy with the pistol in its hand seems to
be grinning at me.

I flick my radio off and rely on plain
old-fashioned speech to keep my words local: "Chaitin," I say slowly,
"that corpse. The one with the gun. Did he shoot everyone else here—or
could it have been someone else? Was he defending himself?"

The big guy looks puzzled. "I don't see—" He
pauses, then sidles round the table until he's as close to the corpse
as he can get. "Uh-huh," he says. "Maybe there was someone else here,
but he sure looks as if he shot himself. That's funny—"

My radio drowns him out. "Barnes to all: we've
found Professor O'Brien. Howard, get your arse downstairs to basement
level two, we're going to need your expertise to get her out. Everyone
else, eyes up: we have at least one bad guy unaccounted for."

My skin crawls for a moment: What the hell can
be wrong with Mo if they need me to help rescue her? Then I notice
Chaitin watching me. "Take care," he says gruffly. "You know how to
use
that thing?"

"This?" I clumsily pat the basilisk gun hanging
from my chest pack. "Sure. Listen, don't touch that machine. I mean,
like really
don't touch
it. I think it's dead but you know what
they say about unexploded bombs, okay?"

"Go on." He waves me past him at the door and I
go out to find Scary Spice crouched in the corridor, eyes swivelling
like a chameleon on cocaine.

"Let's go." We head for the stairs, and I can't
shed the nagging feeling that I've missed something critically
important: that we're being sucked into a giant cobweb of darkness and
chilly lies, doing exactly what the monster at its centre wants us to
do—all because I've misinterpreted one of the signs around me.

The basement level is colder
than the surface rooms and passages. I find Sergeant Pike there,
helmet undogged, breath steaming and sparkling in the light of a
paraffin lamp someone has coaxed into oily, lambent
life. "What kept you?" he asks.

I shrug. "Where is she and how is she?"

He points at the nearer of two corridor
entrances; this one is lit by a chain of bioluminescent disposables, so
that a ghastly chain of green candlelight marks the route. My stomach
feels suddenly hollow. "She's conscious but nobody's touching her till
you've given the okay," he says.

Oh great.
I follow the chain of ghost
lights to the open door—

The door may be wide open but there's no
mistaking it for anything other than a cell. Someone's stuck another
lantern on the floor, just so I can see what else is inside. The room
is almost completely occupied by some kind of summoning rig—not a
torture machine like the one upstairs, but something not that far away
from it. There's a wooden framework like a four-poster bed, with
elaborate pulleys at each corner. Mo is spread-eagled on her back,
naked, tied to the uprights, but the effect is just about anything
other than kinky-sexy—especially when I see what's suspended above her
by way of more pulleys and the same steel cables that loop through her
manacles. Each of the uprights is capped by a Tesla coil, there's some
kind of bug-fuck generator rig in the corner, and half the guts of an
old radar station's HF output stage arranged around the perimeter of a
crazy pentacle surrounding the procrustean contraption. It's like a
bizarre cross between an electric chair and a rack.

Her eyes are closed. I think she's unconscious.
I can't help myself: I fumble with the locking ring on my helmet then
raise my visor and take a breath. It's cold in here—it's been about
eight hours since she was abducted, so if she's been there that long
she's probably halfway to hypothermia already.

I shuffle closer, careful not to cross the
solder-dribbled circuit inscribed on the stone floor. "Mo?"

She twitches. "Bob? Bob! Get me out of here!"
She's hoarse and there's an edge of panic in her voice.

I take a shuddering, icy breath. "That's exactly
what I'm going to do. Only question is
how.
" I glance around.
"Anyone there?" I call.

"Be with you in a sec," replies Hutter from
outside the door. "Waiting for the boss."

I go fumbling in my padded pocket for the PDA,
because before I go anywhere near that bed I want to take some
readings. "Talk to me, Mo. What happened? Who put you here?"

"Oh, God, he's out there—"

She just about goes into spasm, straining at the
cables in panic. "Stop that!" I shout, on edge and jittery myself.
"Mo,
stop
moving,
that thing could cut loose any moment!"

She stops moving so suddenly that the
bed-rack-summoning-bench shakes. "What did you say?" she asks out of
one corner of her mouth.

I squat, trying to see the base of the frame
she's lying on. "That thing. I'm going to untie you just as soon as
I've checked that it isn't wired. Dead man's handle. Looks like a
Vohlman-Knuth configuration—powered down right now, but stick some
current through those inductors and it could turn very nasty indeed."
I've tapped up an interesting diagnostic program on the palmtop and the
Hall-effect sensor embedded in the machine is giving back some even
more interesting readings. Interesting, in the sense of the Chinese
proverb—"May you live in interesting times."—or more likely die in
them. "You use it for necromantic summonings. Demons, they used to call
them: now they're primary manifestations, probably 'cause that doesn't
frighten the management. Who put you on it?"