8. STORMING MOUNT IMPOSSIBLE

THE ARTISTS' RIFLES STORM THE AHNENERBE'S secret fortress with speed and élan, moderated only by tactical caution and a degree of perplexity that deepens as they determine that the castle is, in fact, unoccupied.

First in is the little reconnaissance robot, portaged into position and released by a couple of tense soldiers half a kilometre away from the rest of the expedition. As it rolls onto the flat killing apron around the redoubt, Bravo team moves like ghosts through the petrified forest on the other side of the castle. Everybody is tense: nobody talks on radio while their line of sight is on the castle, and nobody wants to be visible, either—on infrared against this chill landscape, a human being will stand out like a magnesium flare.

The robot rolls out onto the killing apron in front of the castle, little puffs of snow fountaining up behind its treads. At this point if anyone is guarding it we'd expect to see fireworks, but nothing happens: nobody shoots, nothing lights up. I hunch over behind Hutter's shoulder, watching the video feed via the secure fibre-optic cable. The castle is dark, except for a central building that glows red hot, two hundred and fifty degrees hotter than the ambient temperature. It silhouettes the battlements, towers, and radomes nicely.

Alan circles a hand above his head twice, and a long way away a sleeping dragon erupts. A dot of light sizzles across the frozen landscape on a jet of flame and slams into the outer door of the gatehouse: lumps of stone and metal tumble silently through the empty vacuum above it. Things begin to happen very quickly as Alpha team lays down fire on the gatehouse and Bravo team skids out across the ice behind the castle and makes for the forbiddingly high walls. A chain of fireworks erupts from the ground and bursts over the battlements in front of them, then-

Nothing. Nothing but silence and the jerky movements of Alan's men. They reach the foot of the wall and swarm up it as if they aren't wearing heavy backpacks, while a second Dragon launcher pops a rocket off at the front of the castle and someone—Sergeant Howe, I think—beats the courtyard with machine-gun fire that makes small mushroom clouds of white vapour burst from the ground. And there's still no answering fire.

"Alpha secure," someone grunts in my headphones. Then: "Bravo secure. Cease fire, cease fire, we've got an empty venue."

"Empty? Confirm." It's Alan's voice. He doesn't sound perturbed, but-

"Alpha here, the place is empty," insists whoever's using that call sign. "As in abandoned."

"Bravo confirms, Mike here. There's a dead truck in the courtyard but no sign of life up here. Dunno about the central target, but if they've retreated in there they aren't coming out. They wouldn't have heard us, anyway." He sounds nervous, breathy.

"Mike, keep under cover, don't assume anything. Hammer, close in fast and secure the gatehouse. Chaitin, lay on the central blockhouse but hold fire on my word. Charlie team move in."

Alan stands up and runs forward, crouching close to the ground; across the landscape I can see the others moving toward the castle's shattered gates—popping up and lunging forward for a few seconds then diving flat to the ground, ready to fire.

Still nothing happens. What's going on? I wonder. Only one way to find out: I stand up and jog forward

heavily, feeling the backpack ramming my feet down onto the frozen ground. The empty killing apron is about a hundred metres wide and I feel really naked as I step out onto it, out of the cover of the petrified forest. But there's no sign of life in the castle. Nothing at all untoward happens as I trot forward and, panting, heave myself into the shadow of the gatehouse.

It looms overhead, a grey mound of concrete or stone in the darkness; a narrow window, dark as the crypt, overlooks the entranceway. The gates are solid slabs of wood bound in metal, but they lean drunkenly away from the huge hole that the Dragon blew between them. I pause, and someone whacks me in the back: "Howard, get down!"

I get down and feel icy cold through the thick padding on my knees and elbows. There's some radio chatter: terse announcements as each team makes its way through a series of checkpoints. "Chaitin, keep the blockhouse covered. Hutter, any signs of life?"

"Hutter: nothing, boss. Blockhouse is warm, but nothing's moving outside it. Uh, correction. I have a temperature fix on the courtyard; it's a couple of degrees warmer than outside. Probably heat from the blockhouse." The blockhouse is glowing brightly on infrared, a surer sign of life than anything else we've seen.

I edge through the tunnel under the walls—rammed earth overhead, frozen like cement—and peer round the corner at the blockhouse. The name doesn't do it justice; it's the central building in the complex and it's built like a small castle. Windows, high up, big dome erupting from the roof, small doors shut tight against the chill. Some kind of small vehicle, like a weird cross between a tank and a motorbike, is parked against the wall, dusty with a sprinkling that isn't snow.

"Cool, I always wanted a Kettenkrad," someone remarks on the common channel.

"Morris, shut the fuck up; the cylinder heads are probably vacuum welded anyway. Chaitin, check out the doors. Scary Spice, cover with the M40."

Someone who doesn't look at all like one of the Spice Girls moves up beside me and levels something that looks like a drainpipe fucking a submachine gun at the blockhouse. Someone else, anonymous in winter camouflaged pressure gear, jogs forward and then dashes at the door. Bazooka man whacks me on the shoulder to get my attention: "Get back!" he hisses.

"Okay, I'm back," I say. Funnily enough I don't feel afraid at all, which surprises me. "Say, are you sure this isn't Castle Wolfenstein?"

"Fuckin' dinna say that else ye can live with the fuckin' consequences," someone rumbles in my ears. Soldier #1 raises something that looks like a plumber's caulking gun and squirts white paste around the frame of the blockhouse door. Still no sign of a welcoming committee. I glance up at the hostile red stars above the battlements and wonder why I can't see very many of them. A thought strikes me just as the guy with the plumber's mate sticks a timer into the goop and bounds back our way then crouches: "Cover!" The ground bounces and smoke and gas puffs out from the edges of the door—the gunk is a high-brisance explosive and it cuts through the reinforced steel door like a blowtorch through butter. I see the door getting bigger and beginning to squash vertically—then it slams past us and the escaping gush of air bowls me right over and nearly rolls me along the frigid ground.

"Jesus," someone says, and I turn round to see where the door landed behind me. Something is wrong my nerves are screaming—where the hell are the Ahnenerbe? There should be people here, that's what's wrong.

Scary Spice has his grenade launcher levelled on the chamber behind the door, but the air flow has stopped and when Chaitin tosses in a flare it lights up a bare, empty room the size of a garage, with sealed doors to either side. "Spooky," I remark. "Looks empty. Anyone home?"

The SAS aren't waiting around to find out; the whole of Bravo team piles into the empty vestibule in a hurry and Chaitin moves forward. More chatter: "Airlocks, this is a fucking death trap get us in get us in… "

"Castle fucking Wolfenstein, eh?" Alan remarks in my ear, and according to my chest panel he's on a private channel. I join him.

"Why isn't anybody here?" I ask.

"Who the fuck knows? Let's just get inside, fast. You got any ideas?"

"Yeah. If you depressurize this building and Mo's inside you'll have lost us our best clue yet."

"If I don't depressurize that building and some fucking Nazi revenant ices my people I'll have lost more than just our best clue." Someone taps me on the shoulder and I jump, then turn far enough to recognise Alan. "Remember that," he says.

"We're here for information first—" I say, but he's cut over to another channel already so I don't know if he hears me. In any case, he taps me on the shoulder again and waves me toward the vestibule. Where Bravo team has sprung a door with a big locking wheel, hopped through, and the wheel is now spinning behind them. Airlock door, at a guess.

"Bravo, Mike here, we have atmosphere—half a kilopascal at only twenty below freezing. Pressure's coming up: lock safety is tripped. Everything here looks to be in working order, but dusty as hell. We're ready to go through on your word."

I follow Alan and Alpha squad into the vestibule. Scary Spice is busy laying strips of some kind of explosive gunk all around the airlock door, while one of the other soldiers lines up on it with a heavily insulated light machine gun. I flick to the main channel and listen to the crackly chatter; something seems to be wrong with my radio because I'm picking up a lot of noise. Noise-

"Howard here, anybody else picking up a lot of radio hash?"

"Hutter here, who was that? Repeat please, I'm reading you strength three and dropping."

"Hutter, Bob, cut the chatter and use your squelch. We've got a job to do here." Alan sounds distinctly preoccupied; I decide interrupting is a bad idea and focus instead on my suit radio in case there's a problem with it. A minute of fiddling tells me that there isn't. It's a really cute UHF set, able to hop around about a zillion sidebands at high speed—analogue, not digital, but the pinnacle of that particular technology. If it's picking up hash then the hash is spread far and wide.

I walk back to the vestibule entrance and look up at the sky. The stars are really prominent; the smoky red whirlpool of the galaxy stares down at me like a malignant red eye, startlingly visible against the night. I hunt around for the moon but it's out of direct sight, casting knife-edged black shadows across the pale blue snowscape. I blink, wishing I could rub my eyes. Blue? I must be seeing things. Or maybe the optical filters on my helmet are buggering my colour sensitivity—I've had it happen with computer screens before now.

I turn back to face the interior and someone is waving me forward; the airlock door gapes open. "Howard, Hutter, Scary, your cycle." I move forward carefully. The concrete floor is chipped and scarred, stained with old grease marks. I look round: something large is inching toward the gates—Pike, and the cart with the H-bomb. "I'll follow you through with the charge," Alan adds. I step through into the airlock room, boggling at the array of pipework on view—it's like something out of a war movie, the interior of a beached U-boat, all plumbing and dials and big spinner wheels. Hutter pushes the door closed behind us and cranks a handle. The airlock is narrow, and dark except for our helmet lamps; I shudder, and try not to think about what would happen if the door jams. On my other side Scary Spice yanks a valve-lever in the opposite door, and there's a thin hissing as fog spills into the room from vents along the floor. A needle in my suit's chest instrument panel quivers and begins to move—air pressure. After a few more seconds I feel my suit going limp and clammy around me, and hear a distinct clank as the hissing stops.

"Going through," says Scary Spice, and he spins the locking wheel on the inner door and pushes it open.

I'm not sure what I am expecting to see; Castle Wolfenstein is a definite maybe, and I was subjected to the usual run of second-rate war movies during my misspent childhood, but the last thing on my list would have been a kennel full of freeze-dried Rottweilers. Someone has powered up an overhead light bulb which is swinging crazily at the end of its cord, casting wild shadows across the emaciated-looking corpses of a dozen huge dogs. Next to the airlock is a table, and behind it a wall of lockers; ahead of us, a wooden door leading onto a corridor. The light doesn't reach far into those shadows. Hutter prods me in the back and as I step forward something crunches under my boot heel, leaving a nasty brownish stain on the floor. "Yuck." I look round.

"You can switch your transmitter off," says Hutter, "we've got air." She fiddles with her suit panel: "Looks breathable, too, but don't take my word for it."

"Quiet." Scary Spice looks round. "Mike?"

"Mike here." My radio isn't crackling as much now we're indoors. "No signs of life so far—lots of dusty offices, dead dogs. We've swept the ground floor and it looks as if there's nobody home." He sounds as puzzled as I feel. Where the hell are the bad guys?

"Roger that, Hutter and yon boffin are with me in the guardhouse. We're waiting on reinforcements."

I hear a squeal of metal and look round; Hutter is closing the airlock door again, and it sounds like it hasn't been oiled for fifty years.

"Uh, we have bodies." I jump; it's a different voice, worryingly shaky. Chaitin? "I'm in the third door along on corridor B, left wing, and it isn't pretty."

"Barnes here. Chaitin, sitrep." Alan sounds purposeful.

"They're—looks like a mess room, boss. It's hard to tell, temperature's subzero so everything's frozen but there's a lot of blood. Bodies. They're wearing—yeah, SS uniforms, I'm vague on the unit insignia but it's definitely them. Looks like they shot themselves. Each other. O Jesus, excuse me sir, need a moment."

"Take ten, Greg. What's so bad? Talk to me."

"Must be, uh, at least twenty of them, sir. Freeze-dried, like the doggies: they're kind of mummified. Can't have happened recently. There's a pile against one wall and a bunch around this table, and—one of them is still holding a pistol. Dead as they come. There's some papers on the table."

"Papers. What can you tell me?"

"Not much sir, I don't speak German and that's what they look to be in."

Someone swears creatively. After a moment I realise that it's Chaitin.

"Status, Chaitin!"

"Just trod in—" More swearing. "Sorry, sir." Sound of heavy breathing. "It's safe but, but anyone who comes here better have a strong stomach. Looks like some kind of black magic—"

Hutter taps me on the shoulder and motions me forward: "Howard coming through. Don't touch anything."

The building is a twilight nightmare of narrow corridors, dust and debris, too narrow to turn round in easily with the bulky suit backpacks. Scary Spice leads me through a series of rooms and a mess hall, low benches parked to either side of a wooden table in front of a counter on which sit pans that have tarnished with age. Then we're into a big central hall with a staircase leading up and down, and another corridor, this one with gaping doors—and Chaitin waiting outside the third door with someone else inside.

The scene is pretty much what Chaitin described: table, filing cabinets, pile of withered mummies in grey and black uniforms, black-brown stains across half of them. But the wall behind the door-

"Howard here: I've seen these before," I transmit. "Ahnenerbe-issue algemancy inductance rig. There should be—ah." A rack of stoppered glass bottles gleams from below the thing like a glass printing press with chromed steel teeth. There's a wizened eyeless horror trapped in it, his jaws agape in a perpetual silent scream, straining at manacles drawn tight by dehydrating muscle tissue. I carefully pay no attention to it: throwing up inside a pressure suit would be unwise. Bulldog clips and batteries and a nineteen-inch-wide rack—where's the trough? Answer: below the blood gutters.

"One last summoning, by the look of it, before they all died. Or shot themselves." I trace a finger along the boundary channel of the arcane machine, careful not to touch it: they probably filled the channel with liquid mercury—a conductor—but it's long since evaporated. If it was a possession, that tends to spread by touch, or along electrical conductors. (Visuals, too, although that usually takes serious computer graphics work to arrange.) I turn away from the poor bastard impaled on the torture machine and look at the table. The papers there are brittle with age: I turn one page over, feeling the binder crackling, and see a Ptath transform's eye-warping geometries. "They were summoning something," I say. "I'm not sure what, but it was definitely a possessive invocation." For some reason I have an unaccountable sense of wrongness about the scene. What have I missed?

The mummy with the pistol in its hand seems to be grinning at me.

I flick my radio off and rely on plain old-fashioned speech to keep my words local: "Chaitin," I say slowly, "that corpse. The one with the gun. Did he shoot everyone else here—or could it have been someone else? Was he defending himself?"

The big guy looks puzzled. "I don't see—" He pauses, then sidles round the table until he's as close to the corpse as he can get. "Uh-huh," he says. "Maybe there was someone else here, but he sure looks as if he shot himself. That's funny—"

My radio drowns him out. "Barnes to all: we've found Professor O'Brien. Howard, get your arse downstairs to basement level two, we're going to need your expertise to get her out. Everyone else, eyes up: we have at least one bad guy unaccounted for."

My skin crawls for a moment: What the hell can be wrong with Mo if they need me to help rescue her? Then I notice Chaitin watching me. "Take care," he says gruffly. "You know how to use that thing?"

"This?" I clumsily pat the basilisk gun hanging from my chest pack. "Sure. Listen, don't touch that machine. I mean, like really don't touch it. I think it's dead but you know what they say about unexploded bombs, okay?"

"Go on." He waves me past him at the door and I go out to find Scary Spice crouched in the corridor, eyes swivelling like a chameleon on cocaine.

"Let's go." We head for the stairs, and I can't shed the nagging feeling that I've missed something critically important: that we're being sucked into a giant cobweb of darkness and chilly lies, doing exactly what the monster at its centre wants us to do—all because I've misinterpreted one of the signs around me.

THE BASEMENT LEVEL IS COLDER THAN THE SURFACE rooms and passages. I find Sergeant Pike there, helmet undogged, breath steaming and sparkling in the light of a paraffin lamp someone has coaxed into oily, lambent life. "What kept you?" he asks.

I shrug. "Where is she and how is she?"

He points at the nearer of two corridor entrances; this one is lit by a chain of bioluminescent disposables, so that a ghastly chain of green candlelight marks the route. My stomach feels suddenly hollow. "She's conscious but nobody's touching her till you've given the okay," he says.

Oh great. I follow the chain of ghost lights to the open door-

The door may be wide open but there's no mistaking it for anything other than a cell. Someone's stuck another lantern on the floor, just so I can see what else is inside. The room is almost completely occupied by some kind of summoning rig—not a torture machine like the one upstairs, but something not that far away from it. There's a wooden framework like a four-poster bed, with elaborate pulleys at each corner. Mo is spread-eagled on her back, naked, tied to the uprights, but the effect is just about anything other than kinky-sexy—especially when I see what's suspended above her by way of more pulleys and the same steel cables that loop through her manacles. Each of the uprights is capped by a Tesla coil, there's some kind of bug-fuck generator rig in the corner, and half the guts of an old radar station's HF output stage arranged around the perimeter of a crazy pentacle surrounding the procrustean contraption. It's like a bizarre cross between an electric chair and a rack.

Her eyes are closed. I think she's unconscious. I can't help myself: I fumble with the locking ring on my helmet then raise my visor and take a breath. It's cold in here—it's been about eight hours since she was abducted, so if she's been there that long she's probably halfway to hypothermia already.

I shuffle closer, careful not to cross the solder-dribbled circuit inscribed on the stone floor. "Mo?"

She twitches. "Bob? Bob! Get me out of here!" She's hoarse and there's an edge of panic in her voice.

I take a shuddering, icy breath. "That's exactly what I'm going to do. Only question is how." I glance around. "Anyone there?" I call.

"Be with you in a sec," replies Hutter from outside the door. "Waiting for the boss."

I go fumbling in my padded pocket for the PDA, because before I go anywhere near that bed I want to take some readings. "Talk to me, Mo. What happened? Who put you here?"

"Oh, God, he's out there—"

She just about goes into spasm, straining at the cables in panic. "Stop that!" I shout, on edge and jittery myself. "Mo, stop moving, that thing could cut loose any moment!"

She stops moving so suddenly that the bed-rack-summoning-bench shakes. "What did you say?" she asks out of one corner of her mouth.

I squat, trying to see the base of the frame she's lying on. "That thing. I'm going to untie you just as soon as I've checked that it isn't wired. Dead man's handle. Looks like a Vohlman-Knuth configuration-powered down right now, but stick some current through those inductors and it could turn very nasty indeed." I've tapped up an interesting diagnostic program on the palmtop and the Hall-effect sensor embedded in the machine is giving back some even more interesting readings. Interesting, in the sense of the Chinese proverb—"May you live in interesting times."—or more likely die in them. "You use it for necromantic summonings. Demons, they used to call them: now they're primary manifestations, probably 'cause that doesn't frighten the management. Who put you on it?"

"This skinny guy, with a suntan and a German accent—"

"From Santa Cruz?"

"No, I'd never seen him before."

"Shit. Did he have any friends? Or do anything to set up that rack over there?"

I inspect the top of the framework. The chandelier-thing hangs from the roof of the execution machine like a bizarre, three-dimensional guillotine blade: cut any of the ropes holding Mo to the bed and it will fall. I'm not sure what it's made of—glass and bits of human bone seem to figure in the design, but so do colour-coded wires and gears—but the effect will be about as final as flicking the switch on a frog in a liquidiser. Trouble is, I'm not sure the damned thing won't fall anyway, if someone switches on the device.

"No," Mo says, but she sounds doubtful.

I'm checking around the foot of the necromantic bed now, and it's a good thing the instrument's got a log display: lots of very bad shit has gone down here, ghosts howling in the wires, information destroyed and funnelled out of our spacetime through weirdly tangled geometries of silver wire and the hair of hanged women. Bastards. I really ought to keep Mo talking.

"I was asleep," she says. "I remember a dream—howling air, very cold, being carried somewhere, unable to move. Like being paralysed, scary as hell and I couldn't breathe. Then I woke up down here. He was leaning over me. My head aches like the mother of all hangovers. What happened?"

"Did he say anything?" I ask. "Make any adjustments?"

"He said I'd served my purpose and this would be my final contribution. His eyes, they were really weird. Luminous. What do you mean, make adjust—" She tries to raise her head and the bed creaks. There's an ominous buzzing sound from the control panel at the far side of the room and a red light comes on.

"Oh shit," I say, as the door opens and two soldiers in vacuum gear come in and the lights flicker. I see the chandelier-like thing above Mo sway on its ropes, hear the bedframe creak. As she gathers breath to scream I clumsily jump onto the bed and brace myself on hands and knees above her. "Someone cut the fucking cables, pull her out, and cut the fucking wires!" I yell. I'm kneeling on one of them when the descending mass of obsidian and bone and wire lands on my backpack with a crunch—and I discover the hard way that the thing is electrified, and Mo is wired to earth.

MY HEAD IS SPINNING, I FEEL NAUSEOUS, AND MY right knee feels like it's on fire. What am I doing-

"Bob, we're going to pull it off you now. Can you hear me?"

Yeah, I can hear you. I want to throw up. I grunt something. The crushing weight on my back begins to lift. I blink stupidly at the wooden slats in front of me, then someone grabs my arm and tries to pull me sideways. Their touch hurts; someone, maybe me, screams, and someone else yells "Medic!"

Seconds or minutes later I realise that I'm lying on my back and someone is pounding on my chest. I blink and try to grunt something. "Can you hear me?" they say.

"Yeah-oof."

The pounding stops for a moment and I force myself to breathe deeply. I know I should be lying on something, but what? I open my eyes properly. "Oh, that wasn't good. My knee—"

Alan leans over my field of view; people are bustling about behind him. "What was that all about?" he asks.

"Is Mo—"

"I'm all right, Bob." Her voice comes from right behind me. I start, and it feels like someone's clubbed me behind the ear again—my head is about to split open. "That—thing—" her voice is shaky.

"It's an altar," I say tiredly. "Should have recognised the design sooner. Alan, the bad guy is loose here. Somewhere. Mo was bait for a trap."

"Explain," Alan says, almost absent-mindedly. I roll my head round and see that Mo is sitting with her back to the wall, legs stretched out in front of her; someone's given her one of the red survival suits, no good in vacuum but enough to keep her warm, and she's got a silver foil blanket stretched around her shoulders. Behind her, the altar is a splintered wreck.

"It's not so hard to open a gate and bring an information entity through, especially if you've got a body ready and waiting for it at the other end, right? Physical gates are harder, and the bigger you want 'em, the more energy or life you have to expend to stabilize it. Anyway, this is an altar; there are a couple like it in the basement of that museum we came to visit. You put the sacrifice on the altar, wire it to an invocation grid, and kill the victim—that's what the chandelier was for—channelling what comes back out. Only this one—the guards and wards around the altar are buggered. They'd offer no protection at all once the summoning was manifest, and the thing would take over anyone it could come into contact with. Transfer by electrical conduction, that's how a lot of these things spread."

"So you tried to shield her with your body," says Alan, "How touching!"

"Huh." I cough and wince at the answering pain in my head. "Not really; I figured the scaffold wouldn't be able to cut through my air tanks. And if it killed her we'd all be dead, anyway."

"What was it set up to summon?" Mo asks. Her voice still hoarse.

"I don't know." I frown. "Nothing friendly, that's for sure. But then, this isn't the Ahnenerbe, is it? Even though they built this place, they've been dead for a long time. Suicide, by the look of it. This bastard's some kind of possessor entity—jumps from body to body. It's been shadowing you from the States, but when it got you all it did was use you as raw material in a summoning sacrifice. Doesn't make sense, does it? If it wanted you so bad, why not just walk up to you, shake hands, and move into your head?" "It doesn't matter right now." Alan stands. "We're leaving soon. According to Roland the gate's shrinking; we've got about four hours to pull out, and your mystery kidnapper hasn't tried to make a break for it. What we're going to do is put a guard on the gate, get the hell out of here, and leave the demo charge ticking. He won't be able to sneak back around us, and the gadget will toast what's left of this place."

"Uh-huh. How's my tankage?"

"Dented, and your suit front panel is blown—it took the brunt of the charge, otherwise you'd be a crispy critter right now. Look, I'm going to get things organised in person, seeing all our radios are flaking out." Alan looks round. "Hutter, get these people sorted out and ready to pull back; I want them both mobile within the hour, we've got a lot of shit to move out of here." He glances down at me and winks. "You've done well."

Over the course of the next fifteen minutes I recover enough to sit up against the wall, and Mo just about manages to stop shivering. She leans against me. "Thank you," she says quietly. "That went way beyond—"

Hutter and Chaitin bang in through the door, heaving a couple of bulky kit-bags full of assorted gear: vacuum support underwear, heated outer suit, a new regulator and air tank for my framework, a new backpack and helmet for Mo. "Look at the lovebirds," Chaitin says, apparently amused by us. "On your feet, pretties, got to get you ready to move and ain't nobody going to carry you."

While Hutter is getting Mo into her pressure gear I stumble around the wreckage of the procrustean bed and hunt for my palmtop—dropped when I had to leap for her life. I find it lying on the concrete floor, evidently kicked into a corner of the room, but it's undamaged, which is a big relief. I pick it up and check the thaum level absently, and freeze: something is really not right around here. Following the display I trail around the walls until I find an inexplicably high reading in front of that rack of high tension switchgear. Something is happening here: local entropy is sky-high as if information is being destroyed by irreversible computation in the vicinity. But the rack is switched off. I pocket the small computer and give the rack an experimental yank; I'm nearly knocked off my feet when it slides toward me.

"Hey!" Chaitin is right behind me, shoving me out of the way and pointing his gun into the dark cavity behind the rack.

"Don't," I say tersely. "Look." I switch on my suit headlamp, and promptly wish I hadn't.

"Oh Jesus." Chaitin lowers his gun but doesn't look away. The room behind the instrument rack is another cell: it must have been undisturbed for a long time, but it's so cold that most of the body parts are still recognisable. There's a butcher's shop miasma hanging over it, not decay, exactly, but the smell of death. Enough spare parts for Dr. Frankenstein to make a dozen monsters lie heaped in the room, piled in brown-iced drifts in the corners. "Shut the fucking door," he says distantly, and steps out of my way.

"Anyone got a hacksaw?" I ask.

"You can't be serious—" Chaitin pushes up his visor and stares at me. "Why?"

"I want to take samples from the top few bodies," I say slowly. "I think they may be something to do with the Mukhabarat's Santa Cruz operation."

"You're nuts," he says.

"Maybe, but don't you want to know who these people were?"

"No fucking way, mate," he says. Then he breathes deeply. "Look, I was in Bosnia, y'know, the mass graves?" He glances down and scuffs the floor. "Spent a couple of weeks guarding the forensics guys one summer. The worst thing about those pits, you scrubbed like crazy but in the end you had to throw your boots away. Once that smell gets into the leather it won't leave." He looks away. "You're fucking out of your skull if you think I'm going to help you take trophies."

"So just get me an axe," I snap irritably. (Then I wince again and wish I hadn't.) He looks at me oddly for a moment, as if trying to make his mind up whether or not to get physical, then turns and stomps off.

When Chaitin returns he's carrying a fireman's axe and an empty kit-bag. He leaves me alone for ten minutes while I discover just how difficult it is to chop through the wrist bones of a corpse that's been frozen for days or months. I find that I'm angry, very angry indeed—so angry, in fact, that the job doesn't upset me. I want to find the bastard who did this and give him a taste of his own medicine, and if chopping off dead hands is the price then it's a price I'm happy to pay—with interest.

But why do I still feel as if I'm missing something obvious? Like, maybe, what the demon—dybbuk, possessor, whatever-you-call-it—lured us here for?