The Nightmare Stacks: A Laundry Files novel (32 page)

All-Highest’s near-smile fades.
“Fifth-of-day intervals? That’s not good enough. I want you to raise your situational awareness to operational levels immediately.”

“The plan called for that to happen at dawn; I will bring the schedule forward as you direct.”
Infantry Third’s face is impassive, but All-Highest senses her fear as a tightening in the silvery spiderweb of obligations that is an ever-present tingling at the back of his head.
“There is a problem keeping the magi fed: constant contact is expensive
…
”

“I don’t care if you run out of sacrifices. Have a squad round up some natives. Our magi are perfectly able to consume urük blood.”
 

“That will make life easier! It will be as you command.”
All-Highest feels Infantry Third’s relief immediately.
“By your leave
…
”

“Go.”
All-Highest gestures. Infantry Third marches over to her team and begins giving orders: her men and women attend, and presently messengers depart towards the magi’s pavilion. All-Highest watches for a minute, then turns back to his own bodyguards.
“I have seen enough.”
He turns his mount away from the cliff face and rides slowly downhill. From experience he knows that it will take half an hour for the last of the cavalry force to leave the valley, and another half hour for the infantry battalion to get into position. But everyone
will
be in position an hour before dawn, including the onrushing cavalry spearhead – and then it will be time to engage the enemy.

As Pinky pulls out of the driveway and turns onto the empty dual carriageway, Pete glances in the back of the van. Brains is busy with the rack of routers and the picocell base station; it’s hard to be sure in the slowly strobing shadows cast by the streetlights, but he looks worried. “Where next?” Pete asks.

“Quarry House car park.” Pinky sounds distracted as he gears up, making the diesel engine bellow hoarsely. “We can unload Ilsa there: she should be safe for a while.”

“Hang on,” calls Brains. “What was that again?” He’s talking into a headset, Pete realizes. “Yes, I’ll tell them. Change of plan, guys. We’re going for a spin around the Inner Loop before we drop everything off at QH.”

The Inner Loop is a five-kilometer-long one-way route that snakes through Leeds city center like a particularly demented level from
Grand Theft Auto
, twining between town hall and railway station, alongside hospital and under Victorian viaduct. It’s not an actual road: more a succession of loosely coupled street signs that direct traffic around the pedestrianized core, in such a way that unless the driver knows exactly which exit they’re aiming at they’re locked into a frustrating twenty-minute stop-go detour. “What for?” demands Pinky. “Isn’t everywhere closed at this time of night?”

“Yes, but that was Lockhart. He wants us over at the Royal Armouries: he’s getting one of the curators out of bed to let us into the special repository. It’s going to be” – Pinky joins in suddenly, and they chorus – “
just like Christmas
!”

“Um,” says Pete, in the sudden gap as Pinky hurls the van and trailer across the deserted roundabout with the ring road, “am I missing something?”

“Lockhart wants us to raid the nightmare stacks for anything that isn’t nailed down. That’s the special collection at the National Firearms Centre,” Brains adds. “Silver bullets, cold iron, banishment rounds, that sort of thing.”

“The National Firearms Centre?”

“The Ministry of Defense has a hobby: they’ve been buying one of everything ever since Henry VIII’s day. They used to keep it at the Enfield Royal Small Arms Factory – it was the Enfield Pattern Room back then – but it got too big and cumbersome, so when they built the Royal Armouries Museum up here they bolted a secure underground archive on the side. That’s the NFC. It’s basically a reference library for firearms. You’ve seen
The Matrix
?”

Pete racks his brains. Shiny black latex, bullet-time video, cold-faced agents— “You mean that bit with the guns?”

“Yeah, it’s just like that,” says Pinky. “Only it’s real.”

“But what are we going to
do
with a load of guns?” asks Pete.

“I don’t know, Brains, what
are
we going to do with a half-track full of guns?” Pinky asks.

Brains chuckles. “Same thing we do every night, Pinky —”

“Fort up and wait for reinforcements,” Pinky says flatly. “Because Alex has disappeared, Lockhart is spooked, and Forecasting Ops are convinced the world could end tomorrow.”

“But,
guns
—” says Pete, channeling his inner British unease at the idea of prepping for survivalist role-playing games in built-up areas.

“Relax,” says Pinky, flooring the accelerator as he drives past Woodhouse Moor Park, “we won’t be taking anything too big. Did you know,” he adds, taking his eye off the road to grin manically at Pete, “that the original Quarry Hill Flats were designed to be defensible with machine guns from any approach in case of a Communist revolution? That was in the 1920s! I just bet Lockhart’s aware of that…”

Pinky steers them onto the Inner Loop and then turns off, to crawl through backstreets between red brick warehouses refurbished and given an afterlife as riverside apartments. They come to a halt in a pedestrianized courtyard before a modern building with a glassed-in entrance, incongruously flanked by eighteenth-century naval carronades. “Right, this is it,” he says, opening his door and climbing out. “Pete? You’re driving Ilsa, we can stack a bunch of extra stuff on her and use the trailer. Brains, you handle filling the van. I think this is our man now…”

“Our man” turns out to be female, thirty-ish, and distinctly annoyed at being pulled out of bed at two in the morning. “You,” she says, pointing her flashlight at Pinky in a no-nonsense way that suggests a personal history encompassing time in the military, “you realize this is a no parking zone?”

Pinky raises his warrant card. “Jan Downum?” he asks.

“Yes – oh hell, wait. Are
you
why I’m here?” She steps forward until she can see his card clearly. “Bugger. Who are your mates?” Introductions are made. “Okay. I’m the designated keyholder for the stacks. If you’d kindly move your van and park over on that side of the cannon, yes, over
there
, I’ll take you in through the side entrance. You all have official ID on you? And you’re unarmed? There are metal detectors and we’ll have to search you if you set them off.”

She leads them through a windowless entrance in a neighboring building, then through a keypad-secured door leading to a corridor with a freight lift at the end. They descend at least two stories before the lift stops. It terminates in a lobby with a uniformed guard on duty beside a metal detector arch and a baggage X-ray belt. He is, Pete realizes with a lurch of unease, carrying a holstered pistol at his hip.
Armed guards at a British museum?
“Good morning,” the guard says. He nods at Ms. Downum. “If you’d present your ID, please? Jackets and shoes go on the belt, along with any bags, phones, wallets…”

The security check is thorough by airline standards, in line with the flaming hoops Pete has become desensitized to ever since he got himself sucked into one of the more obscure lagoons of the security state. “Remember: no photography, no phone use, no wandering off, and no touching the exhibits without prior permission,” Downum warns them once the blue-suiter on the front desk signs them in and signs them off as definitely not carrying anything illegal, immoral, or fattening. “This is a working archive and all the items we keep here are operational, which means they’re capable of killing you. Any questions?” She stifles a cavernous yawn, then glares at them.

“Er, yes,” says Pete, just as Pinky asks, “Have you been told what we’re here for?”

“Yes. Follow me,” she says, unlocking another windowless door leading into a white-walled corridor wide enough to take a shipping pallet. “I’m to take you to the special collection and sign out anything you need —” She opens the next door and Pete stops dead in his tracks, heart hammering.

Beyond the doorway Pete sees a windowless room with a high ceiling. Every square centimeter seems to be covered in gun racks; the opposite end of the room is a solid wall of rifles. The floor facing him is occupied by a different kind of exhibit. Eight tripod-mounted heavy machine guns are drawn up side by side, their rifled muzzles converging on the doorway; in the middle, the black cylindrical bundle of an M134 Minigun’s six barrels squats atop an electrical ammunition feed and a battery pack, aiming straight at his face. A laminated placard dangles from it by a string. It warns: SHOPLIFTERS WILL BE OBLITERATED.

“Ooh, that’ll do nicely!” says Pinky.

“I’m not sure it’ll work.” Brains bends over the minigun and peers at its mounting bracket. “Remember it’s American and Ilsa is all-metric —”

“But we could weld a mount to the top of the tow hitch!” Pinky is clearly getting excited. “I’m pretty sure there’s room for the ammunition box to fit in the engine cover storage —”

“Children,” says Pete, “what are we here
for
?”

Pinky looks up guiltily. “Didn’t Lockhart tell you?” he asks Brains.

“Sure did.” Brains straightens up, shoves his hands in his pockets, and looks smug.

“Spill it, love.” Pinky’s eyebrows furrow minutely, but Brains is clearly annoyed about something: possibly the idea of his partner wreaking such indignities on an eighty-year-old vehicle, or perhaps something else that Pete isn’t privy to. “Come on, not
now
—”

Downum clears her throat noisily. “If you gentlemen would care to stop drooling and step this way, we’re
not there
yet.” She sounds more than slightly peeved. “I’m not the only person you’ve got out of bed this weekend, and you don’t want to keep Harry waiting.” She doesn’t wait for a reply, but walks rapidly past a rack of bolt-action rifles towards a door at the back.

“Harry?” asks Pete, trailing after her.

“Harry?” Pinky echoes, a trace of awe in his voice: “
Harry
works here now?”

“Whoops,” says Brains, his mustache crinkling in a smile, “what a surprise! Don’t tell me you hadn’t wondered where he got moved to after they closed Dansey House.”

“I thought he was in the New Annex…”

Pete follows their guide through another echoing arsenal that smells of machine oil and (very faintly) of powder fumes, keeping half an ear on Alex’s two tech support housemates as they bicker good-naturedly. Surrounded by the tools of violence he feels cold, lonely, and a million miles away from his calling. This is not for him, he realizes, this callously light-hearted joshing amidst a hundred half-filled graveyards. He’s too used to seeing the other side of the equation, to offering comfort to the numbed survivors and weeping bereaved. It’s not that he’s a pacifist: the theology of the just war doesn’t seem obviously wrong to him, and some of the things the Laundry are called upon to protect humanity from are so unambiguously outside the light of creation that it’s an open-and-shut case. When the enemy is the end of all life he can’t even object to the use of demon-haunted tools and ritual magic in self-defense. But these aren’t tools for blocking the incursion of nameless horrors from beyond the walls of the world: these are instruments of human slaughter. And the bodies at the crime scene outside the ring road might have pointy ears, but they were human enough that the blood puddling around them in the headlights was red.

Downum eventually pauses at another door. She knocks: two slow, then a pause, then three fast. A muffled voice from the other side replies, “Yuss, coming.” There’s a sound of heavy objects shifting, then the door scrapes open.

“Pinky my son! And your prodigal brainiac!”

The grizzled man stares past Pete and Downum at Pinky and Brains. He looks to be in his sixties: one eye is covered by a piratical black patch, and he’s wearing overalls and cotton gloves which once were white but are now stained with gun oil.

“Long time indeed, Harry.” Pinky grins. “Pete? I don’t believe you’ve met Harry. Harry the Horse, meet Pete the Vicar…”

Brains doesn’t smile, or take time for social niceties. “Lockhart sent us. I believe you have a picking list for us.”

“I do indeed.” Harry backs into the room, wheezing slightly. “An’ I’ve been busy, as you can see.” A wooden pallet sits atop a small forklift, piled high with metal ammunition boxes and odd-shaped drab fiberglass carriers. Behind it, the room is tricked out with floor-to-ceiling warehouse shelves, crammed with storage boxes and wooden crates. “Something tells me you’ve got some ideas of your own” – he finally focusses on Pete – “and your new friend. So tell me son, what’s going on upstairs?”

Pinky shuffles aside, then half-turns and hams it up: “Brains… what
is
going on upstairs?”

Brains takes a deep breath, then shrugs. “We’ve got an incursion, but it’s not the normal kind.” He stares at the loaded wooden pallet. “Long on pointy ears and cold iron, short on tentacles and mindless brain eating. Colonel Lockhart thinks they’re heading this way, maybe targeting HQ North. We’ve got one OCCULUS team in town, but they’re busy – another is on its way up the M6 but won’t be here for a couple of hours yet. They’ve got one of our people; Gerry wants us tooled up in case we can get him back – or in case the bad guys come for us.”

Harry shakes his head. “Children’s crusade. Children’s fucking crusade.” He taps the pile of boxes on the pallet with one size-eleven boot. “If we are talking about
fair folk
” – his eyes narrow – “then this little lot will only get you so far. But if you come into the back with me, I think I can get you something more useful.” He turns and walks back between the shelving units; after a brief shared look with Downum, Pete finds himself following. “Bang-sticks.” Harry snorts. “No, you don’t want regular guns for dealing with those fuckers. What you want is back here in the stacks, where we keep the really
useful
nightmares…”

While the British armed forces are administered by the Ministry of Defense in London, the army itself has a headquarters complex in Andover, a picturesque town in Hampshire, about forty-five kilometers from the deep water port of Southampton on the south coast of England. Andover is an army town, home to the headquarters of the Defense Logistics Organization as well as the Chief of General Staff. It’s part of a sprawling complex of army headquarters bases in Hampshire and Wiltshire, near the south coast channel ports, including the Army Air Corps’ helicopter squadrons, the main battle tanks of the Royal Armored Corps, and the Royal Artillery.

(It is possible to get from Hampshire or Wiltshire to Leeds by road, but not without aggravation; it’s nearly four hundred kilometers by motorway, the traffic congestion is legendary, and both routes are prone to being blocked by accidents.)

Well-run armed forces do not operate on an office-hours-only basis and close for public holidays in the face of active threats. One of the oldest tricks in the book is to launch a surprise attack the weekend before a public holiday. However, maintaining readiness around the clock is expensive. The British Army burned through huge accumulated stocks of equipment during the turbulent first decade of the twenty-first century, and the draw-down from Iraq and Afghanistan coincided with an austerity-minded government intent on cutting the national budget to the bone. Furthermore, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union nobody anticipated a military attack on the homeland at short notice. (Terrorism is one thing, but you can generally spot a mechanized strike force with air support preparing for operations weeks or months in advance.) So staffing levels fell to the lowest level since the 1920s, and by the spring of 2014, with no clear threats on the doorstep, the Army was unready to deal with out-of-hours invasions. Reserves and active forces were reduced, equipment was not replaced, and by the small early hours of one Saturday night in March, the office of the General Staff is occupied by a handful of sentries, some outsourced cleaners, and one tired and irritable major. The major is staying awake by multitasking, dividing his attention among a stack of procurement process manuals (soporific), a mug of tepid coffee (stimulant), and the website of ARRSE, the Army Rumor Service (distraction).

The last thing he expects is an after-midnight phone call, so when his network phone begins to buzz it takes him a moment to focus. “GHQ duty desk, Major Cameron speaking. Who is this?” He stares at the caller ID display. The call is coming from
somewhere
in the MOD, but it’s not an office he recognizes. “Hello?”

A woman’s voice speaks. “GHQ? This is Q-Division, Special Operations Executive, Headquarters North. We have a major incident developing, reference PLAN RED RABBIT, that’s PLAN RED RABBIT.”

“You’re
who
?” Cameron stares at the phone, perplexed. The only Special Operations Executive he’s heard of was a Second World War sabotage organization, disbanded in 1945 after a postwar turf war with MI5. He has no idea what PLAN RED RABBIT could be, but it’s probably buried in his big fat ring binder of coded alerts. Unless it’s a prank call, of course. He wouldn’t put it past a couple of the sprogs in the mess to set him up the bomb, but— “Please hold,” he says, dumps the procurement bumf on the beige-tiled carpet, pulls the desk binder over, and flips pages one-handed. It doesn’t take long. “Please confirm that plan again?”

“PLAN RED RABBIT. Focus is Headquarters North, Quarry House in Leeds. We have a major incident developing, confirmed hard contact with enemy special forces in North Leeds, and we need you to activate RED RABBIT
now
—”

Major Cameron’s eyes widen as he quickly reads the page. “Let me confirm and get back to you,” he says, and hangs up hastily, before the terrifying litany on the other end of the line deteriorates into a series of ancient curses chanted in an alien tongue. He hastily scribbles the phone number on his blotter, then says the first thing that comes into his head, which is: “What the
fucking
fuck?”

It may be four in the morning, but the phone call has reached the parts that coffee cannot wake. He kicks his chair back, yanks a key ring from the key box next to his desk, and rushes into the main office next door without pausing to fill out the logbook. Which is technically a breach of regulations, but if this
isn’t
a fucking juvenile prank by a Rupert from Sandhurst it’s quite possibly an emergency, and if it
is
a prank the idiot whose idea of a joke this is will be cleaning toilets with a toothbrush for the next decade. Or worse.

Four minutes of rummaging through the pages of another ring binder from the RESTRICTED documents cupboard in the next office convinces Major Cameron that if it is a joke, the prankster is a boss-level overachiever. PLAN RED RABBIT is indeed a thing. It’s the current post-2010 strategic defense review update to something that first showed up in the files in 1945 as PLAN BLUE BUNNY, then got updated in the early 1950s to PLAN GREEN GOBLIN and in the 1970s to PURPLE PEOPLE EATER, suggesting a slight shortage of serious intent on the part of the operations planners or their management. But RED RABBIT nevertheless exists, and furthermore, the printed first page of the plan indicates that an alert coming from SOE Q-Division is one of the start conditions. Except that RED RABBIT is a response plan for a
Never Happens
scenario.

The Army has contingency plans for
everything
.
*
They used to have plans for invading the USA – a counterstrike after the anticipated US annexation of Canada – at least until the mid-1930s. They still have plans for organizing stay-behind resistance after a Soviet invasion, even though the USSR hasn’t existed for a quarter of a century. These are half-jokingly classified as
Never Happens (Probably)
. But RED RABBIT is a
Never Happens (Definitely)
case. Its mere existence is probably nothing more than the only remaining evidence of an awful homework assignment handed out to a bunch of Sandhurst cadets as informal punishment for getting too fresh with a visiting lecturer. RED RABBIT is indexed in the classified lexicon on the same page as RED HARE and RED HORSEMAN. RED HARE is the plan for what to do if and when Martian death tripods land on Horsell Common; RED HORSEMAN is the official Army plan for dealing with the Apocalypse of St. John the Divine.
*
†
But RED RABBIT is a little different…

Cameron reads the next page, swearing softly in disbelief, then hastily goes back to the key safe to pick out a key to a somewhat smaller steel cabinet containing files that were once marked as SECRET, before the coalition government upended the entire security/confidentiality classification system and replaced it with a multidimensional thing of horror that nobody quite understands. There is a directory of code names that squaddies aren’t supposed to know because what they don’t know can’t scare them. He looks up SOE, then Q-Division, and starts swearing even more loudly. There is a phone number in the directory, and he makes a note of it, then locks the file back in the cupboard before he returns to his desk, and dials the number.

“Ops desk,” says a male voice at the other end of the line. Cameron stops swearing audibly: the number he dialed connects via the Ministry of Defense’s own internal voice-over-IP network. If it’s being spoofed, even for a wind-up mess hall hoax, someone’s head will roll.

“Q-Division, this is Army GHQ. I have a caller claiming to be one of yours from, ah, Headquarters North, who is declaring PLAN RED RABBIT is in effect. Can you confirm?”

“Yes, please hold while I transfer you. Headquarters North situation room coming up.”

His phone blares hold music for a few seconds – a snatched ear worm refrain that digs its claws into his head in seconds, D:Ream’s “Things Can Only Get Better” – then the same woman’s voice speaks: “Hello? Is that GHQ?”

“Yes,” Major Cameron says through gritted teeth, then forces himself to loosen up. His palms are damp. “Can I confirm that you definitely want to activate PLAN RED RABBIT?”

“Yes.” The woman’s tone is incisive. “We have two dead non-human intruders, missing personnel, and an incursion in North Leeds. An OCCULUS team from 23 SAS is on-site and can confirm through their own reporting chain. This is not an exercise.”

“Understood.” Cameron takes a deep breath. “Okay, we’re under strength right now so I need to go off-line and work the phone tree. Call me back in half an hour if you haven’t heard anything. Sooner if you have any further developing contacts.” He crosses the fingers of his free hand under the table.

“Wilco. I’ll tell London to prep a pre-cleared liaison bod to brief you in person. HQ North out.” She hangs up without waiting, and Cameron flips to the next page in the ring binder, then opens the Emergency Plan telephone directory and dials the number at the top of the page.

The phone rings three times before it’s picked up. To Major Cameron it feels like an eternity because this can’t possibly be a prank, but it can’t be the real thing either, and if it’s a prank the prankster has gone well beyond latrines-and-toothbrush territory at this point and is now looking at a court martial, and Cameron is looking at early retirement if he’s lucky —

“Yes?” The voice is rough from sleep, but clearly awake. “Who is this?”

“Sir,” Cameron forces himself to stay calm, “this is Major Cameron at GHQ. I have an authenticated emergency report and am putting the major incident plan into effect. You are my first contact. SOE Q-Division just reported a contact situation in Leeds and have declared PLAN RED RABBIT.”

“RED – fuck me. RED RABBIT? Seriously?”

Cameron keeps a straight face: he figures under the circumstances the general is allowed to swear. “Yes, sir, at least they’re taking it seriously. 23 SAS is apparently involved.”

“Understood. I’m on my way in. Carry on, tell everyone to get their arse in gear and there’ll be a briefing at 0500 hours.”

The general hangs up and Cameron briefly pauses to wipe his forehead, then dials the next number on his list. He feels
slightly
less tense: if Major General Holmes has heard of RED RABBIT and this Q-Division mob and is taking them seriously, then he’s made the right call. “Sir, this is Major Cameron at GHQ. I have a confirmed major incident in progress and the major incident plan is in effect. You’re needed at HQ for a 5 a.m. briefing…”

After the top five seats get a personal wake-up call, Cameron hits his computer terminal and sends out a priority message to the crackberries of everyone who qualifies for a pager these days (not for secure data, but just to ensure they’re on a leash): MAJOR INCIDENT BRIEFING AT 5 A.M. Then he goes back to ruining the colonel’s beauty sleep. He has one job for now, and that’s to ensure that when Major General Holmes gets to the briefing room it will be full of equally unhappy officers (and a sprinkling of civil servants) and that someone will be there to fill them in on what the hell is going on.

Martian invasion: sure, the Army understands what it needs to do, if not necessarily how to go about it. Religious apocalypses involving the Four Horsemen: pass the holy water and bend over, here it comes again. But invasion by the armies of Middle Earth – who ordered
that
?

Alex leads Cassie down into the Lawnswood bunker.

He pauses a couple of steps down the sloping corridor, briefly adjusting his phone. The OFCUT suite can run a defensive ward, although it’s hell on battery life and has an annoying tendency to screw with GPS location. Also he feels the need to collect himself. Cassie isn’t keeping her distance anymore, but wraps her arms around his waist and leans her chin on his shoulder. “What are you doing?” she asks quietly.

“Necessary preparation, assuming we’re going to do this thing we’re not talking about. Hush a moment…” He slides his phone away again. “Okay, let’s go. Uh, there was a caretaker living here. What do you suppose happened to him?”

“Don’t ask.” She lets go of him as he takes a step forward. “They
might
have taken him prisoner.”

He recognizes a comforting lie when he hears one. “He might have taken the night off, too.” He hates himself a little for wanting to believe it, so distracts himself by walking forward.

The blast door looms around the curve of the tunnel, gaping into the corridor. (In event of a nuclear attack, huge hydraulic rams stand ready to pull it closed, flush with the wall, to allow the shock wave to blow past the bunker’s entrance.) A ghostly greenish radiance spills from beyond the threshold: there are more luminous grids painted here, and Alex is careful to hold Cassie’s hand as he advances. He can feel the energy in the ley line rushing through, far below his feet.
Of course the entry node would have to be in the basement, wouldn’t it?
“Will there be other guards here?” he asks.

“Not soldiers. They might have set mage-beasts to guard the anchor instead.”

Alex swallows. “And mage-beasts are…?”

“You don’t have…? Oh. Of course you don’t. Creatures compelled to obedience by a trainer-mage, like guard dogs. Or like” – she frowns – “living sentry guns? From that movie with the woman and the cat who fights the dragon queen at the end?”

“You mean
Aliens
?”

“YesYes!” Cassie is happy with her shiny pop-cultural reference but Alex’s heart sinks. His idea of a second date was dinner with family, not a live-action dungeon crawl. Meanwhile he’s wearing a sports jacket and chinos and the other side are playing for keeps. “Cassie.” He takes a deep breath, trying to control his fright, because if he is certain of one thing it is that he is deadlier than he realizes, and if he knows anything about this baffling, infuriatingly attractive intrusion in his life it is that she is equally capable of looking after herself –
Jesus, she killed an armed guard without breaking a sweat.
“We’re on the top floor of three and we’re going to have to take the stairs. Are you armed?”

“Of course!” She offers him the handle of a steel knife the length of her forearm. He recognizes it from the assortment of stabby accoutrements the soldiers upstairs had strapped to various parts of their armor: judging by the basketwork hand-guard it’s a
main gauche
, a parrying dagger.