Charles Stross - The Apocalypse Codex

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THE APOCALYPSE CODEX

Ace Books by Charles Stross

SINGULARITY SKY

IRON SUNRISE

ACCELERANDO

THE ATROCITY ARCHIVES

GLASSHOUSE

HALTING STATE

SATURNS CHILDREN

THE JENNIFER MORGUE

WIRELESS

THE FULLER MEMORANDUM

RULE 34

THE APOCALYPSE CODEX

THE

APOCALYPSE CODEX

CHARLES STROSS

ACE BOOKS, NEW YORK

THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

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This is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Copyright 2012 by Charles Stross.

Jacket illustration by Mark Fredrickson.

Text design by Kristin del Rosario.

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FIRST EDITION : July 2012

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Stross, Charles.

The apocalypse codex / Charles Stross. 1st ed.

p. cm. (A laundry files novel)

ISBN: 978-1-101-58113-1

1. Howard, Bob (Fictitious character)Fiction. 2. EvangelistsFiction. 3. Geeks (Computer enthusiasts)Fiction. 4. Intelligence serviceGreat BritainFiction.

5. DemonologyFiction. I. Title.

PR6119.T79A66 2012

823.92dc23 2012008569

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

ALWAYS LEARNING

PEARSON

FOR TERESA NIELSEN HAYDEN

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As usual, Id like to thank my regular test readers for their sterling work in kicking the tires. In addition, Id like to thank my agent Caitlin Blasdell and her assistant, Hannah Bowman; TNH (the best editor I never had); and Marty Halpern (who has gone above and beyond the call of duty for any copy editor in his work on the Laundry Files).

In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his
level of incompetence.

Dr. Laurence J. Peter, The Peter Principle

Table of Contents

Prologue

OFFICE JOB

THINGS ARE GETTING BETTER: ITS BEEN TEN MONTHS, AND I only wake up screaming about once a week now. The physiotherapy is working and my right arm has regained eighty percent of its strength. The surviving members of the Wandsworth Cell of the Brotherhood of the Black Pharaoh have been arrested and detained indefinitely at Her Majestys Pleasure, in accordance with the secret supplementary regulations in Appendix Six of the Terrorism Act (2003); and every day, in every way, my life is getting better and better.

(The happy pills help, too.)

Please ignore the nervous tic; its an unavoidable side effect of my profession. The names Howard, Bob Howard: Im a hacker turned demonologist, and I work for the Laundry, the secret agency tasked with protecting Her Majestys Realm from the scum of the multiverse. The nightmares, scars, and post-traumatic flashbacks are the fault of the bad guys, some of whom also work (or rather, worked) for the Laundrywhich fact is currently causing a shit-storm of epic proportions to rage through the corridors of government.

Ten months ago, while seconded to the BLOODY BARON committee, I stumbled across evidence of a leak inside the Laundry. That sort of thing is supposedly impossible (our oath of office supposedly binds us to service on peril of our soul) but, nevertheless, Angletonwhose assistant I am, and who is not entirely humanset a trap for the mole, with yours truly as the tethered goat.

Things got a little out of hand, and before the dust settled the Black Brotherhood attempted to raise and bind an ancient evil called the Eater of Souls, using a ritual that required a human body for it to possess. (Guess who they had in mind for the starring role?) Luckily for me they hadnt quite worked out that the Eater of Souls already is incarnate in a bodyAngletonsbut before the Seventh Cavalry arrived I discovered the hard way that Nietzsche was right: if you stare into the Abyss for too long it stares into you , and likely finds you crunchy with ketchup and a little relish on the side. Bad dreams ensued all around, and it left me with a disquieting new talent that Ive been doing my best to avoid thinking about too hard.

Well, they arrested Iris and her surviving minions and sent them to a camp in the Lake District where it rains sideways five days out of four, all technologies invented after 1933 are forbidden, and if you walk too far beyond the perimeter fence you find yourself walking back towards it. I imagine thats where they live to this day, when theyre not answering questions in a room where the patterned carpet makes your eyes burn if you stare at it for too long, and your tongue writhes like a tapeworm in your mouth if you try to stay silent.

As for me, I got to go home four months ago. I finished writing up my confidential report, and the nightmares have mostly stopped: I only dream about the fence of living corpses around the step pyramid on the dead plateau a couple of times a week now, and the hole in my right arm has mostly healed. So Im all right, at least on paper.

A month ago, I went back to work. Im on light duty for the time being, but Im sure thatll change once management decides to feed me back into the meat grinder.

BEFORE I CONTINUE, IVE GOT A CONFESSION TO MAKE.

A couple of years ago, Angleton told me to start writing my memoirs. Which should have struck me as really fishywhy on earth should a junior civil servant in an occult intelligence agency be required to write a memoir ? (Especially as ninety percent of the stuff therein is classified up to the eyeballs and protected by wards that will make steam boil out of your ears if you try to read it without the right security clearance.) But Im older and more cynical these days, and I understand the logic behind it.

The deadliest threat to any covert organization is the loss of institutional knowledge that comes with the death or retirement of key personnel. The long-term survival prospects for those of us who practice the profession of applied computational demonology are not good. Let me put it another way: Ive got a really generous pension waiting for me, if I live long enough to claim it. As we drift helplessly into the grim meat-hook future of CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, the final crisis when the stars come right, the walls between the worlds dissolve, and the monsters come out to play, were going to need more sorcerers than can be trained by conventional methods; were going to have to drop a lot of our existing security practices, allow the stovepipes between departments to melt, lower the firewalls, and get these sorcerers up to speed and mixing new metaphors as fast as possible. These memoirs are therefore intended to feed into an institutional knowledge base that, by and by, will help my successors (including new operations management personnel) to survive by allowing them to avoid my non-fatal blundersblunders I only lived through because I made them in a kinder, more forgiving age.