Halting State

on. And there are much worse things a black hat troupe on a capture-the-flag rampage can do these days than just grabbing passwords and borking hospital networks. Lots of critical engineering systems rely on encrypted tunnels running over the Internet, lots of SCADA systems and worse—remote medical telemetry (“but you said you wanted your blood test results analysing as fast as possible!”), stock-market transactions, civil airliner flight plans, and exercise program updates to coffin dodgers’ programmable pace-makers. The spooks in Guoanbu probably are professional, they wouldn’t mess with the European SCADA infrastructure short of an outright shooting war…but are they likely to realize that they’ve almost certainly been pwn3d by their own pet griefer clan, and all their electronic armoured divisions are in the hands of a dozen Asperger’s cases with attention-deficit disorder and a quantum magic wand?

It’s not a risk you can take. And it’s not a risk you can explain to Barry Michaels, because you know his type, and after seventy years of data processing, they still think that coders can be hired and fired; that the engineers who ripped out the muscles and nerves of the modern world and replaced it with something entirely alien under the skin are still little artisans who will put their tools down and go home if you tell them to leave the job half-done.

You’re half-worried that Elaine will make a big deal of it, but instead she nods quickly, walks up behind your chair, and pecks you on top of the head. “Don’t go ’way,” she says, then backs out of the room in a hurry. You find yourself staring after her with a warm interior glow of confusion to keep you company: The idea that you might go away while she’s counting on you being here is just plain bizarre.

You dive back into the tunnel into the mountains of madness. It’s icy cold and very dark except where your head-mounted lamp is pointing, and the walls are covered with intricate hieroglyphs beneath their thin layer of rime. The floor is uneven and worn, and you shuffle forward slowly, sniffing suspiciously. The Guardian of the Depths lives hereabouts, but frequently sorties from its chamber of horrors to patrol the upper levels. You can’t hear the faint leathery susurration of its progress as it worms its way around the Antarctic catacombs like a vast, malignant slug, but that doesn’t mean you’re safe: It’s smart enough to lurk in ambush if it hears an unwary human or ursinoid.

In this Zone shard, you’ve tooled up to the tech limit—the blunderbuss has given way to a monstrous Steyr IWS-2000, and you’ve got an RPG-30 slung over your shoulder in case the Anti-Materiel Rifle fails to dent the Guardian’s hide—but you’re unlikely to triumph by force of arms in Lovecraftland. In fact, just tiptoeing around here on your own would be suicidally foolhardy if you didn’t have a couple of very unfair safewords up your sleeve.

You shuffle along the passageway. A T-junction looms out of the gloom in front of you, empty twin dark tunnels mocking you like vacant eye-sockets. You grunt and shine your torch down the left-hand branch, consulting the map you summoned from the vasty deeps of your phone’s memory earlier (carefully misspelled and misfiled to throw the inevitable googlebots off, lest some gameco crawler stumble across it in the public search indices and flag this complex as spoilered). There should be a landmark around here—

Aha! Landmark 192 humps up out of the frosty trail on the floor. The unfortunate explorer is curled foetally in his sealskin parka, facing the wall as if in his last moments he imagined that hiding his face from the crawling horror might save him. Which means you’re about ten metres away from the oubliette. You rise to your knees and lope forward until the darkness gives back a greater shadow, the round mouth of the Guardian’s cavern.

Summoning your words of power—and shouldering the IWS-2000—you step in front of the black pit of despair. The Guardian, as your torch beam rapidly informs you, is OUT: Therefore you get to play another day. (There are two ways around the Guardian: admin mode, or a ten-kiloton tacnuke. And unfortunately Lovecraftland is owned by your former employers and they didn’t give you either of the magic keys when they showed you the door.) So you step down the weirdly reticulated snail’s-tongue slope that leads into the conical pit, paying no attention to the eldritch bioluminescent glow from the ceiling or the piles of bones and other debris that line the floor of the huge space, and lope across to the irregular, pentagonal altar at the far side of the dungeon. Ten more seconds, and you’ll have your buried loot—

Bamf.

Oh bugger, you think, as no less than four glowing indigo holes appear in the air, occupying an arc between you and the altar. Someone got creative…

You flick the safety off and shoulder the AMR, aiming at the first eerie shape as it begins to take on humanoid form. In the real world, only a complete lunatic would fire the IWS-2000 from the shoulder or in a confined space— it’s a crew-served weapon—but when you’re a quarter-ton bull ursus, reality gets to take a back seat; besides, you’ve got the musculature and bone structure to take the recoil at least once.

Darkness grins at you and takes a step forward as you squeeze the trigger.

Things get a little confusing at this point, because you’ve run up against one of the limits of Zonespace: the lack of haptic feedback. But when the view stops jittering and clipping, you realize that the recoil has flung you all the way back to the altar, and the thing you shot at isn’t there anymore—spooks and shades may be nasty enough for normal adventurers, but they’re not up to stopping twenty grams of armour-piercing fin-stabilized discarding sabot love missile when it comes knocking at fifteen hundred metres per second. You track on the second shade as it raises its arms and does the zombie-lurch towards you, and pull the trigger again. This time you see what happens as the hypersonic shock wave turns the bogeyman into a humanoid smokering, but your vision flickers red, and you notice that you’re down 30 per cent on your stamina. Which is not good at all as bogey three looms closer, baring teeth that stretch and waver like a mirage—

Another round, and another palpable hit. But your vision’s reddening, now and you see you’re down to 50 per cent: What the fuck? You think, then blink up the medical chart and realize to your horror that it’s the AMR: You’re turning your own shoulder into ground hamburger with the recoil. Which is pants—in the real world the AMR just has a kick like a mule, that’s what the shock absorbers and the muzzle brake are for—but the Zone weapons committee clearly got it wrong, and you’re stuck taking damage from your own gun like you’re a seventy-kilo noob or something.

There’s no time to switch to a different weapon—bogey four is crouching in readiness for a cavern-crossing leap, its claws and fangs lengthening—so you grit your teeth and aim, squeezing off another shot. The magazine’s down to one round, but bogey four disintegrates in mid-air. There’s a crash and a cloud of dust and icy gravel showers down from the roof, almost blocking the doorway, and your stamina read-out begins to flash: At 20 per cent you’re in big trouble, medevac territory in a guild scenario, but there are no healers around right now. Never mind…

You put the anti-tank rifle down and turn around. The ghastly altar is still there. It’s made of pale granite, and it seems to throb slightly as you look at it, as if it’s on the verge of turning inside out like a Necker cube: The hieroglyphs are as alien and incomprehensible as ever, but somehow horrible, bringing to mind echoes of alien anatomy, organs ripped from the abdominal cavities of human sacrifices, and other, hidden things. “Great,” you mutter. “Attention, object able charlie sixteen. This is your creator speaking. Give me a cookie and initiate debug mode.”

The altar flashes emerald and turns inside out, injecting the stolen hoard straight into your character’s inventory. And you’re tooled up! Now let the games begin.

SUE: Making Plans for Nigel

After the briefing, Liz held you back for a couple of extra minutes. “I met your nerd and librarian this morning,” she says. “You didn’t tell me they were a couple.”

“You—” You blink. “What makes you think that?”

“Well, Sergeant, only the fact that she’s wearing his spare trousers. And Bob Lockhart picked them both up at Mr. Reed’s address. It does tend to complicate things, doesn’t it?”

You blink again. “Christ, skipper, that’s news to me.” You try to square the memory with how they’d acted earlier: not a sniff of any office hanky-panky, that was for sure, not that it’s any of your business what they get up to in their spare time. “I didnae get any sign of it earlier.”

“Well, they’re working for Michaels now, I am informed. That’s where this shitstorm is blowing in from.” She gives you an odd look. “When CopSpace comes back up, call me before you look up Mr. Reed’s previous, Sue. It’s