Halting State

glasses, so that as the spooks move through the building, they feed a map of it into a shared overlay. It’s a bit like having X-ray vision. Then you begin to get a headache: The rooms are ghosting, not matching up. “Scheisse,” says your MIB, raising her paintball gun.

Red ideograms drip down the walls, bloody trails of information bleeding into the edges of your visual field. There’s a harsh squawking noise as the MIB spins round and unloads two rounds into the wall, half-deafening you. She shouts something in German and dashes towards an inner door, beyond which the ghostly outline of a lift shaft is superimposed over a spiral staircase and a small office, alternate realities competing for your attention. There’s another bang from inside the building, and the lights flicker. Liz looks round at you, her face white, and begins to say something, but a noise like grinding metal drowns her out, and pale tentacles vomit from her mouth. You can’t see the door you came in at anymore—the ideograms are everywhere, mocking you, and none of the walls match up. You take the nearest entrance, which is roughly where you remember the front desk as being. The room is slowly spinning around you, and there are bugs crawling on the walls. Your stomach twists, bile rising at the back of your throat: Then someone touches you. You jump a mile before your realize it’s Liz, tugging at your glasses. With them off, the room turns out to be insect-and rotation-free, but the grinding noise continues, mingling with shouts and the occasional banging of paint guns. “Get out!” she shouts, close enough to your ear that you can actually hear her. “Tell Verity!”

You nod, and she shoves you towards the doorway—visible now you’ve gotten out of the treacherous glasses. You pause in the entrance and fumble your official specs onto your face, but they’ve crashed completely; a rolling curtain of many-coloured hash blocks out your visual field. You pull them off hastily. Better to face the world barefaced than risk whatever chaos is fucking up your CopSpace.

You stumble out into the daylight, blink like a startled hedgehog while you get your bearings back, then home in on the chief, who is standing beside the HQ truck. “It’s a right mess in there,” you begin.

He cuts you off immediately: “Do they need backup?”

“I’m not rightly sure, CopSpace is fucked. The inspector told me to tell you, they’ve hit countermeasures. They’re flailing about in the toy box, you know?”

“Right.” He takes a deep breath. “Go back in and find Liz. Keep us in the loop. You, over here!” He gestures at the heavies from S Division, who’re waiting about near their response cars. “Get your goggles off, follow the sergeant here, and get ready to find out what the feds have got themselves hung up on.”

“But I—” It’s no use complaining: The chief has got it into his head that this is some kind of ned-in-a-china- shop problem, and unless you can get Kemal to stop laying about and get the hell out, Verity’ll send in the armed response boys after him. And won’t that be a fine mess? “On my way, sir.”

You rush back over to the warehouse and dive in the door, staying low. “Inspector,” you yell, over the noise —it’s like someone’s running a sawmill in there—“where are you?”

“Through here!” You just about hear her voice and home in on it. There’s a doorway behind the counter and an office. Chairs have been knocked over, and there’s a huge smear of purple paint on one wall. More to the point, it’s dark. Hitting the light switch doesn’t achieve much—someone’s cut the power. You draw your torch and flick it to wide-angle, lighting up the ceiling with it at arm’s length, then duck-walk towards the second, inner door.

The room looks to have been halfway converted into open-plan offices, once upon a time. Cast-iron pillars spaced every four metres or so support a high ceiling of wooden timbers—but the floor has been raised and covered in those beige tiles they use to cover cable ducts, and the arched, shuttered window casements all have air- conditioning units bolted to the wall below them. The lights are out, and the room is not only dark, but sweltering hot and spectacularly noisy. Between each pair of pillars a glass-fronted box like an old-style telephone booth rises most of the way to the ceiling, and these are the source of the racket: There must be at least twenty of them. You glance through one smoked-glass front, somewhat spooked, and see rows of green-and-violet LEDs blinking from a sea of aluminium fascias. They’re routers or telephone switch gear or something. Each pillar emits a blast of hot air and a variety of hissing, crackling, and whining noises, but the real source of the noise is somewhere deeper inside the building.

You find Liz near the centre of the room, kneeling over a Eurocop who is retching himself dry over a waste- paper basket. She’s got his glasses off, and when she glances at you, she looks haggard. “Don’t go anywhere near the stairwell,” she warns you. “Maurice and Jacques are still making sure the site’s clear before they scram the backup generator.”

Backup generator? “The chief’s about sixty seconds away from sending in S Division,” you tell her. “He telled me to be your runner.”

“I see.” The Man in Black stops puking long enough to groan and sit back, leaning against a pillar. Liz thinks for a moment: “Tell the chief it’s all under control, but we hit electronic countermeasures. So far all we’ve got is lights on and nobody home, but if S Div come in shooting, it’s going to go blue on blue.”

“Electronic countermeasures.” You look around in disbelief. “Is that all this is?”

“No,” she says tightly, “but we’ll have it off-line in a couple of minutes. Go!”

You’ll say this for Verity, the old fart doesn’t believe in stomping on his subordinates’ chilblains. “Tell Kavanaugh she’s got fifteen minutes, or until she calls for backup.” You high-tail it back to the room of servers and pass the word on.

“Good. Mario, are you feeling better yet?” Mario, now sitting with his back to the pillar and the bin within arm’s reach, nods wearily. His glasses lie on the floor nearby, lighting the carpet up with a jagged lightning show.

“I will be alright.” He doesn’t sound it. “The others will…” He stops talking and takes a couple of deep breaths. “They’re upstairs now, except Hilda and Franz. They are looking for the generator.”

It’s almost as if someone is listening to him: There’s a tremendous double bang that shakes the floor, followed by the moan of a thousand fans whirring down into silence.

You can’t stop yourself. “It sounds like they found it,” you say, and—despite yourself—giggle. After a moment, you realize Mario and Liz are both staring at you as if you’ve grown a second head. So you stop.

“Let’s go and find Kemal,” says Liz. “What are these things, anyway?”

“Multi-core blade servers,” Mario pushes himself laboriously to his feet. “Each rack houses two hundred and fifty-six blades, each blade has that many processor cores—and each core is a thousand times as powerful as your phone. We are standing inside a million euros’ worth of mainframe.” He shuffles towards the interior of the data centre, back bowed like an old man. “This is an odd place to put a data centre, yes?”

You look at Liz: Liz looks back at you and shrugs. You mouth “ICE” at her, and she just twitches. “Who owns them? Where are they from?” she asks.

“That is an interesting question.” And one that Mario, who is rapidly recovering his composure, does not appear to want to answer. You peer at one of the glass doors, shining your torch through: The panel inside is labelled LENOVO.

He heads towards the other end of the server room, and Liz follows him closely. You stick behind her, logging everything (you hope). At the other end of the room there’s a set of fire doors and a stairwell leading up—as well as another pair of fire doors with some kind of blinking fire-alarm and gas sensor mounted next to them, and Kemal himself clattering down the stairs towards you. “Not in there!” he calls.

“Why not?” asks Liz, peering at the blinkenlights by the door.

“It might not be safe.” Kemal’s eyes look hollow without the goggles. You shine your torch on the panel; it seems to be saying there’s no problem.

“Right,” she says with heavy irony. “I see.” She pushes the door open before Kemal or Mario can stop her. “What is this?”

It’s another server room, but a lot smaller than the last one, and there’s a Frankenstein machine squatting in the middle of it all, like a cheap horror prop. There are cylinders of compressed gas and lots of narrow pipes and valves, all converging on something that looks like the stainless steel thermos flask from hell, sitting under an industrial-grade cooker hood with a gigantic duct vanishing into the ceiling. There’s another rack of boxes with blinkenlights sitting next to it, flashing and winking—evidently they’re on a separate power supply. And it’s steaming, a trickle of chilly smoky vapour wreathing its neck. “Hey, is this dangerous?” you ask.

“Stay away from it, Sergeant!” Kemal insists sharply. “It might be explosive.”

That’s a thought, but you’ve heard enough bullshit already that you’re not about to take his word for it. What