The Atrocity Archives (30 page)

He glances at his watch. "Only another
fifty-seven minutes to go, lad. We can probably make it to the gate if
we leave in less than half an hour, as long as there aren't too many of
the blighters left outside—so I'd hurry up if I was you."

"Could we take it with us?" I ask.

He barks a short laugh. "What, you think they'd
thank us for dragging a live quarter-megaton bomb back into one of the
most densely populated cities in Europe?"

"They can't stop it then?"

"Take an act of God to stop it now," Howe says
with gloomy satisfaction. "Take an act of God to get us all out of
here
alive, too. Bet you're wishing you hadn't come back!"

I lick my lips, but my tongue seems to have
turned to dry leather. Leathery, like one of Brains's weirdly
scrambled-in-its-own-shell eggs. Which reminds me: suddenly what I have
to do comes crystal clear. "I think I know how to get your people out
regardless of whether there are any revenants outside," I say. "Same
way I got in here without anyone spotting me. As for the bomb—what if
just a bit of the implosion charge goes off prematurely? Say, at one
end of it?"

Alan looks at me oddly. "How are you going to do
that?"

"Never mind. What happens
if
? If, if.
Way I remember it, all nuclear weapons these days use a core of
plutonium and a set of shaped charges that
interlock around it. When they go off, they have to be really precisely
timed or the core doesn't implode properly, and if it doesn't implode
it doesn't reach critical mass, and if it doesn't go supercritical it
doesn't go bang. Right?" I'm almost bouncing up and down. "There's
some
stuff I need just outside the airlock—a bag of severed hands, a
basilisk gun. I've got the rest of the kit here. How many of us are
there upstairs, roundabout, who need to walk out? The sack has enough
samples cut from execution victims to make Hands of Glory for
everyone—walk right past the lurkers in the forest.
If
someone
goes and gets them right now. As for the bomb … "

I'm still thinking about the bomb as Sergeant
Howe wordlessly ducks into the airlock and I hear the hiss of
depressurisation. Ticking, ticking. The bomb's booby-trapped. I need to
figure out a way of reaching through the case, reaching past the wires
and the polystyrene foam spacers around the plutonium rod, past the
surrounding parcels of lithium deuteride wrapped in depleted uranium,
through the steel casing of the A-bomb trigger—

Alan is standing in front of me, leaning in my
face. "Bob."

"Yeah."
The basilisk gun is the solution. I
think
 … 

"Hand of Glory. Tell me what the hell I need to
know."

"A Hand of Glory is fabricated from the hand and
wrist of someone who has been wrongly executed. A fairly simple circuit
is inscribed around the radius and ulna and the fingertips are ignited.
What it does is a limited invocation that results in the bearer
becoming invisible. In effect. There are variations, like the inversion
laser—stick a phase-conjugate mirror on the base and it makes a
serious
mess of whatever the hand's pointed at—but the original use of the
hand
is as a disintermediating tool for observer/subject interactions. Or so
Eugene Wigner insisted. How many people have you got?"

The airlock door is cycling: Alan crouches, gun
levelled on the door. He waves me off to one side impatiently.

It's Howe. No luminous worms behind his face
plate; he hefts a lumpy, misshapen sack and my basilisk gun as he steps
through the door.

"Seven, plus yourself. You were saying?" Alan
asks.

"Give me." I take the sack.
It's like
peeling potatoes,
I tell myself,
just like peeling potatoes.
"Anyone got a roll of duct tape? And a pen? Great, now clear the fuck
away and give me room to breathe." Just like peeling potatoes, strange
vegetables that grow in a soil of horror, watered with blood. A lot of
the original bits of folklore surrounding the Hand of Glory are just
that. You don't need a candle made of human fat, horse dung, and
suchlike, with a wick made of the hair of a hanged man. You don't need
fingers from the fetus of a hanged pregnant woman, amputated stealthily
at midnight. All you need is a bunch of hands, some wire or solder, a
pen, a digital-analogue converter, a couple of programs I carry on my
palmtop, and a strong stomach. Well, I can fake the stomach: just tell
myself I'm peeling spuds, sticking bits of wire in Mr. Potato Head,
triggering ghost echoes in a decaying neural network, feeding something
arcane. Howe pushes in and insists on copying what I do; it's annoying
at first, but monkey-see monkey-do gets results and between us we make
short work of the sack. A couple of the hands are washouts but in
twenty minutes flat I've got a shrunken bag and a row of ghastly
trophies arranged on the guardroom table.

"Here," I say. Scary Spice—who has been
shuffling nervously and keeping one eye on the airlock door—jumps.

"What's up?"

Howe watches with silent interest.

I hold up a hand. "Look." Thank Cthulhu for
pocket soldering irons: the fingertips ignite neatly, that crypt-glow
dancing around them.

Scary Spice looks confused. "Where are you?
What's up?" His eyeballs are sliding around like greased marbles; he
instinctively raises his gun.

"Safe that!" snaps Howe. He winks in my general
direction.

"Hold out your left hand, Scary," I say.

"Okay." He shuts his eyes; I shove the stump of
the hand into his glove. "What the fuck
is
this?"

I blink and try to focus on him, but he's
slipping away. It's weird; I try to track him but my eyes refuse to
lock on. "What you're holding is called a Hand of Glory. While you're
holding it, nobody can see you—it works on the possessors outside,
too,
or I wouldn't be here."

"Uh, yeah. How long's it good for?"

"How the fuck should I know?" I reply. I glance
at Howe.

"Put it down
now
," he says. A hand
appears on the table and I find I can focus on Scary again. Howe
glances at me. "This is a bloody miracle," he says morosely. "Pity
we
didn't have it a couple of years ago in Azerbaijan." He keys his mike:
"Howe to all, we've got a ticket home. Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, everyone
downstairs
now.
Captain, you're going to want to see this too."

It's like being at school
again, sitting one fucking exam after another, sure that if you
don't finish the question in the set time it's going to screw your
life.
This
exam, the fail grade is anything short of 100
percent and you get the certificate, with no appeal possible,
milliseconds after you put your pen down.

I'm crouching in the basement with Alan and a
thing that looks like a steel dustbin on a handcart, if steel dustbins
came painted green and neatly labelled
THIS WAY
UP
and
DO NOT DROP
. I will
confess that I'm sweating like a pig, even in the frigid air of the
redoubt, because we are now down to about fifteen minutes and if this
fails we won't have time to reach the gate.

"Take five," says Alan. "You're doing really
well, Bob. I mean that. You're doing
really
well."

"I bet you say that to all the boys," I mutter,
turning the badly photocopied page of arming instructions—the pamphlet
that comes with the bomb has a blue cardboard cover, like
a school exercise book that's been classified top secret by mistake.

"No, really." Alan leans back against the wall. "They got away,
Bob. Everyone but us. Maybe you don't think that's a
big deal, but they do; they'll remember it for the rest of their lives,
and even if we don't follow them they'll be drinking a toast to your
memory for a long time to come."

"That's reassuring." I flip another page. I
didn't know H-bombs came with user manuals and cutaway diagrams,
exploded views of the initiator core. "Look, this is where the pit
goes, right?" I point at the page and then at a spot about five
centimetres above the base of the dustbin.

"No." Alan moves my hand right up to the top of
the bomb casing. "You've got it upside down."

"Well, that's a relief," I say lightly.

"At least, I
think
it's upside down," he
says in a worried tone of voice.

"Uh-huh." I move my finger over the diagram. "Now
this
is
where the detonation controller goes, right?"

"Yes, that's right," he says, much more
reassuringly. I give the green dustbin a hard glance.

Atom bombs aren't that complicated. Back in the
late 1970s an American high school physics teacher got together with
his class. They designed and built an A-bomb. The US Navy thanked them,
trucked it away, added the necessary plutonium, and detonated it down
on the test range. The hard bit about building an A-bomb is the
plutonium, which takes a specialised nuclear reactor and a chemical
reprocessing plant to manufacture and which tends to be kept behind
high barbed-wire fences patrolled by guys with guns.

However, atom bombs do have one interesting
trait: they go "bang" when you squeeze a sphere of plutonium using
precisely detonated explosive lenses.
Conventional
explosives.
And if those lenses don't detonate in exactly the right sequence, if
you scramble them, you may get a fizzle, but you don't get a firework.
It's like an egg, with a yolk (the A-bomb
detonator) and a white (the fusion spark plug and other bang-amplifying
widgets) inside it.

So here I am, sitting next to a rogue H-bomb
with fourteen minutes to run on its clock; and when Alan passes me a
magic marker I draw a big fat X on its casing, because I intend to do
to this bomb exactly what Brains did to his eggs—scramble it without
breaking the shell.

"How many lenses in this model?"

"Twenty. Dodecahedral layout, triangular
sections. Each of 'em is a slab of RDX with a concave centre and a
berylide-alloy facing pointing inward."

"Gotcha." More chalk marks. RDX is mondo nasty
high explosive; its detonation speed is measured in kilometres per
second. When they blow, those explosive lenses will punch the
beryllium-alloy sheet inward onto a suspended sphere of plutonium about
the size of a large grapefruit or a small melon. If you blow them all
within a microsecond or so, the shock wave closes around the metallic
core like a giant fist, and squeezes. If they go off asymmetrically,
instead of squeezing the plutonium until it goes bang, they squirt it
harmlessly out the side. Well, harmlessly unless you're standing
nearby. A slug of white-hot supercritical plutonium barreling out of a
ruptured bomb casing at several hundred metres per second is not
exactly fun for all the family. "That puts the top half of the
hemisphere about—here."

"Very good. What now?"

"Fetch a chair and some books or boxes or
something." I pick up the basilisk gun and begin fiddling with it. "I
need to align this on the hemisphere and tape it in position."

When the beryllium-alloy sphere assembles it
squishes the plutonium pit inward. Plutonium is about twice as dense as
lead, and fairly soft; it's a metal, warm to the touch from alpha
particle decay, and it exhibits some of the weirdest heavy-metal
chemistry known to science. It exists in half a dozen crystalline forms
between zero and one hundred Celsius; what it gets up to inside an
imploding nuclear core is anybody's guess.

"Chair."

"Duct tape."

"What next?"

"Get me a cordless drill, a half-inch bit, and a
pair of scissors."

At the core of the grapefruit there's a hollow
space, and inside the hollow there's a pea-sized lump of weirdly shaped
metal alloy, the design of which is a closely guarded secret. When the
molten-hot compressed plutonium hits it, it vomits neutrons. And the
neutrons in turn start a cascade reaction inside the plutonium; every
time a plutonium nucleus is hit by a neutron it wobbles like jelly,
splits in two, and emits a bunch more neutrons and a blast of gamma
radiation. This happens in a unit of time called a "shake"—about a
tenth of a thousandth of a millionth of a second—and every plutonium
nucleus in the core will have been blasted into fragments within fifty
shakes of the core shockwave hitting the initiator and triggering that
initial neutron burst. (
If
it collapses symmetrically.) And
maybe a few milliseconds later the devil will be free to dance in our
universe.

Twelve minutes to go. I position the chair in
front of the bomb. The back of the chair is made of plywood—a real
win—so I drill holes in it at the right separation, then get Alan to
hold the basilisk box while I chop strips of duct tape off the reel and
bind it to the chair immediately in front of the X where I think the
explosive lenses lie.

"Bingo." One chair. One basilisk gun—a box with
a camcorder to either side—taped to the back of the chair. One ticking
hydrogen bomb. The back of my neck itches, as if already feeling the
flash of X-rays ripped from the bleeding plasma of the bomb's casing
when the pit disassembles in a few scant shakes of Teller's alarm
clock. "I'm powering up the gun now." The gun's sensors face the bomb
through the holes I've drilled in the chair's back. I switch it on and
watch the charge indicator. Damn, the cold doesn't seem to have done
the batteries any good. It's still live, but close to the red
RECHARGE
zone.

"Okay," I say, leaning back. "One more thing to
do: we have to trip the observe button."

"Yes, that seems obvious," says Alan. "Um, mind
me asking why?"

"Not at all." I close my eyes, feeling as if
I've just run a marathon. "The basilisk spontaneously causes about 1
percent of the carbon nuclei in the target in front of it to tunnel
into silicon. With one hell of an energy release at the same time, of
course."