The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross Read Free Book Online

toward his
fingertip. He is still smiling, like a man with his foot clamped to the
third rail of the underground before the smoke and sparks appear. He
opens his mouth. "Yes," he says, in a high, clear voice that is not
his
own. "We are here."
    There are luminous worms writhing behind his
eyes.
     
    "What did you do next?" asks Boris.
    I lean back and stare up at the slowly roiling
smoke-dragons that curl under the fluorescent tubes. It takes me a few
seconds to find my voice; my throat is raw, and not from smoke.
    "Analysed the situation very fast, the way they
train you to: LEAP methodology. Look, evaluate, assign priorities. Fred
had grounded the containment field and the level three agency inside it
flood-filled him. Level threes aren't sapient but the universe they
come from has a much faster timebase than ours; as soon as he crossed
the containment they mapped his nervous system and cracked it like a
rotten walnut. Full possession in two to five hundred milliseconds."
    "But what did you do ?" Andy pushes at me.
    I swallow. "Well, I was opposite him, and he'd
grounded the containment. At that point neither the attractor or the
antinode were up and running, so we were all targets. The obvious
priority was to shut down the possession, fast. You do that by
physically disabling the possessed before the agency
can construct a defence in depth. I'd been worried by the electrics and
made sure I knew where the fire extinguisher was, so that was what I
grabbed first."
    Boris: "It was the first thing that come to
hand?"
    "Yes."
    Andy nods. "There's going to be a Board of
Enquiry," he says. "But that's basically what we needed to know. It
fits with what we're hearing from the other witnesses."
    "How badly was he hurt?"
    Andy looks away. My hands are shaking so much
that my coffee cup rattles against its saucer. "He's dead, Bob. He was
dead the moment he crossed the line. You and everybody else there would
be dead, too, if you hadn't punched his ticket. You've got one
colleague who wasn't there, two who didn't notice what was going on,
and five—including the instructor—who swear blind that you saved
their
lives." He looks back at me: "But we have to put you through the
enquiry process all the same because it was a fatal incident. He was
married with two kids, and there's a pension and other residuals to
sort out."
    "I didn't know." I stop, before I say something
silly. Fred was a jerk, but no man is an island. I feel sick, thinking
about the consequences of what happened in that room. Maybe if I'd
explained things to him during the break, patted him on the back and
sent him away to find a course that would use up his departmental
training credits harmlessly—
    Andy cuts into my introspection: "Oh, it's a
real mess, all right. Always is, when something goes pear-shaped in the
line of duty. I'll go so far as to say I expect the enquiry to be a
formality in this case—you'll probably come out of it with a
commendation. But in the meantime, I'm afraid you're going back to your
office where Harriet will formally notify you that you're suspended on
full pay pending an enquiry and possible disciplinary action. You're
going to go home and cool your heels until next week, then we'll try to
get it over with as fast as possible." He leans back from his desk and
sighs. "This sucks, really and truly, but there's no getting
around it. So I suggest you treat the suspension as time to chill out
and get your head together, get over things—because after the enquiry
I
expect we'll be resurrecting your application for active duty training
and field ops, and looking at it favourably."
    "Huh?" I sit up.
    "Ninety percent of active duty consists of desk
work. You can do that, even if the hat doesn't fit too well. Another 9
percent is sitting around in bushes while the rain drips down your
collar, wondering what the hell you're doing there. I figure you can do
that, too. It's the other 1 percent—a few seconds of confused
danger—that's hard to get