A second-and then a third-fire-control truck has drawn up outside the evacuated hotel and we're in the back of vehicle number two, which seems to be a mobile armoury. I'm stripping off the survival gear and struggling into something like a bastard cross between a body stocking and a piece of bondage rubberwear from hell-low pressure survival gear, Pike tells me-a lycra and silk contraption that seems to consist mostly of straps and is designed to do the same job as a space suit in terms of holding me together and helping me breathe.
"Vacuum isn't as hostile as you probably imagine if you've read too much bad science fiction," he says while I'm grunting and wheezing over the upper half of the suit. "But you'd have real fun breathing without a decent gas seal around your regulator, and without this suit and pressurized goggles you'll end up half-blind and covered in blood blisters within ten or twenty minutes. The real problems are heat dissipation-there's no air around you to keep you cool by convection and insulated from the ground, which is going to be fucking cold-and maintaining your breathing. Cooling we can deal with-this cloth is porous, you start sweating and the sweat will evaporate and keep you cool, and there's a drinking bottle in your helmet. Don't let it run dry, because running one of these suits is a bit like running a noddy suit in the Iraqi desert-you will sweat like hell, you will drink a pint of water and electrolytes every hour, and if you forget to do that you will keel over from heat stroke. Turn round, now." I turn round and he starts tightening straps all the way up my back as if I'm wearing a corset. "These are to keep your rib cage under a bit of elastic tension, help you breathe out."
"What if I need to take a piss?" I ask.
He chuckles. "Go ahead. There's enough adsorbent padding that you probably won't freeze your wedding tackle off."
Trussed up in the pressure suit, I feel like a fifties comic-book hero who's blundered through a fetish movie's wardrobe. Pike passes me a bunch of elbow and knee protectors, a tough overall, and a pair of massively padded moon boots. Somehow I struggle into them. Then he comes up with a lightweight backpack frame with air tanks and-"A rebreather? Isn't that dangerous?" I ask.
"Yup. We aren't NASA and we can't waste five hours depressurising you down to run on pure oxygen. 'Sides, you're not wearing a hard-shell suit. You're going to breathe a seventy/thirty nitrogen-oxygen mix; we scrub the carbon dioxide out with these lithium hydroxide canisters and recycle the nitrogen, adding oxygen to order."
"Uh-huh. How do I change tanks?"
"On your own? You don't-there's a trick to it and we don't have time to teach you. You cut over from tank one to tank two with the regulator valve here, then you ask me to change tanks for you. If someone wants you to change their tank, which they won't unless things go pear-shaped in a big way, you do it like this-" He demonstrates on an unmounted backpack and I try to keep track of it. Then he shows me the helmet and the chest-mounted monitors that keep track of my gas supply, temperature, and so on. Finally he seems satisfied. "Well, if you remember all that you're not going to die by accident-at least not immediately. Still happy?"
"Um." I think about it. "It'll have to do. What about radio?"
"Don't worry about it-it's automatic." He flicks a switch or two on my chest panel, evidently making sure of that. "You're on the general channel-everyone will be able to hear you unless they explicitly shut you out. Now…" He picks up a gadget that looks like a pair of underwater digital video cameras strapped with gaffer tape to either side of a black box gizmo of some kind. "Have you ever seen one of these before?"
I peer closely, then unclip the lid on the box and look inside. "I didn't know they'd successfully weaponised that."
He looks surprised. "Can you tell me what it is and how it works?"
"Can I-yeah, I've seen this arrangement before but only in the lab. This chip here is a small custom-built ASIC processor that emulates a neural network that was first identified in the cingulate gyrus of a medusa. Turns out you can find the same pathways in a basilisk, but… well. There's a load of image processing stuff on the front end, behind those video cameras. Now, I would guess that the two cameras are the optical component of this gadget: we're performing some sort of wave superposition on the target, so…"
"Fine, fine." He passes me a somewhat shop-soiled video camera manual. "Give this a read. And this." He hands me a bundle of typed pages with bright red SECRET headers, then passes me the lash-up. I look it over dubiously: there's an arrow on top of the neural network box with the caption THIS SIDE TOWARD ENEMY, and a flat-panel camcorder viewfinder on the back so you can pretend it's just a computer game you're playing with while you kill people.
What this gadget does violates the second law of thermodynamics: nobody's quite sure why it's so specific, but the medusa effect seems to be some kind of observationally mediated quantum tunnelling process. It turns out that something like 0.01 percent of all the atomic nuclei of carbon in the target zone acquire eight extra protons and a balancing number of neutrons, turning 'em into highly electronegative silicon ions. A roughly balancing proportion of carbon nuclei just seem to vanish, wrecking whatever bonds they were part of.
"How much damage can this thing do to a person?" I ask.
"How much damage will a stubby shotgun do?" Pike responds. "Enough. Silicon-hydrogen bonds aren't stable. Don't point it at anyone and don't switch it on and most of all don't hit the OBSERVE button unless I tell you to. Which I won't, unless you are very, very unlucky. Or unless you decide to blow your feet off by accident, which is your own lookout."
"Understood." I switch off the viewfinder and power down both cameras then gingerly put the gadget down. "You aren't expecting trouble by any chance?"
Pike stares at me. "No, it's my job to see that you don't get into trouble," he says. I take a second to recognise the expression: he's wondering if I'm going to be a liability.
"Tell me what to do and I'll do it," I say. "You're the expert on this."
"Am I?" He looks sceptical. "You're the occult specialist, you tell me what we're up against." He bends down, picks up a rebreather regulator, begins stripping off the insulation panels in an absent-minded sort of way. "I mean it. What are you expecting to find on the other side of this gate?"
Something clicks in my mind: "You've gone through gates before, right?"
He glances at me. "Maybe. Maybe not." I realise that he isn't looking at the rebreather as he strips it: he's got it down to a set of motions he can run through in total darkness. Then it hits me: I'm going to be hopelessly dependent on these guys for just about everything more challenging than breathing. Liability, me? Maybe I don't know what I'm getting myself into after all. But it's a bit late to back out now.
"Well." I lick my suddenly dry lips. "This one, we hope the only things waiting for us are a bunch of superannuated Nazis who've kidnapped one of our scientists. Trouble is, this bunch sent someone through to California, and London, and maybe to Rotterdam, who isn't too superannuated to be banging heads. So I'll take a rain check on the predictions, if you don't mind-expect the worst and hope you're disappointed."