The Nightmare Stacks: A Laundry Files novel by Charles Stross Read Free Book Online

NIGHTMARE GREEN loom? I’m not sure: I haven’t officially been briefed on it yet. However, every time anybody who knows anything mentions the code name they twitch nervously and look over their shoulders like it’s the end of the world. This does not make me happy, because these are people who work with zombies, demons, and Civil Service Documentation Standards on a routine basis.
    Anyway, back to the present. Yesterday evening Pete and I went down the rabbit hole out at Lawnswood. We waited patiently while Bert Finney finished eating his sandwiches. Then he collected his keys and torch, and gave us a tour of Leeds War Room Region 2, also known as The Bunker.
    Shorter version of the report I am about to spend the rest of the evening writing up: the bunker is a dump, a trash-heap, a shit-hole. A damp-infested slum. It probably
can
be restored to functional use, but not at any reasonable cost.
    Slightly longer version: while the bunker is structurally sound – it has walls made of prestressed concrete two meters thick – internally it’s a mess. There’s a pile of broken furniture in the canteen. Virtually none of the fittings elsewhere in the bunker are usable: it has largely been stripped. The cable ducting in the Operational Control Room is rusted, the telephone switchroom contains a Strowger mainframe unit that predates the discovery of fire, the subbasement storage area for dry goods is flooded to a depth of nearly a meter with raw sewage from a leaky toilet outflow, the air conditioning filter packs have crumbled or moldered away, and the caretaker has installed a cat flap in the Secretary of State’s apartment so that his pet can sleep there when it’s not fighting a desperate rearguard action against the rats. This is
before
we mention the early 1990s when the sleeping quarters were used to host illegal raves, and the period during the late 1990s when the canteen was a heroin shooting gallery. There is lead in the roof and the 1940s era smoke detectors contain Americium capsules so intensely radioactive you could make a dirty bomb with them, making it a toxic waste site as well.
    Given several million pounds and a multiyear timetable I think the bunker could probably be renovated to a high standard: but my understanding is that we need a new national headquarters building, not an emergency hole-in-the-ground for when the air raid sirens go off. The only conceivable use I can see for it is if CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN turns out to be an alien invasion, in which case we’re totally fucked.
    What are we doing here? Can somebody explain that to me?
Please?
     
    Tuesday afternoon is overcast and cloudy. Silently cursing the jobsworth who scheduled him for a pre-dusk meeting with his new local supervisor, Alex approaches the discolored aluminum entryphone at the back of the Arndale Centre in Headingley with a deep sinking feeling.
Is this it?
he thinks disbelievingly. He’s at the right address, and the cracked plastic face-plate next to the fourth doorbell holds a card lettered with CAPITAL LAUNDRY SERVICES in hungover handwriting. But the card has slipped down, one corner is stained a suspicious shade of brown, and the door opens off the car park of a tiny, ancient suburban shopping mall. Alex raises a gloved hand and holds the remote entry keyfob he’s been given against the plate as he pushes the button. The lock buzzes, and he steps inside.
    Facilities have leased a number of private sector offices and storage facilities around the outskirts of the city, for temporary use by the London-based staff commuting to Regional Government Continuity Centre (North) – as Leeds is designated in the stilted language of internal Laundry memoranda. These offices are supposedly only temporary, and will vanish like the morning dew as soon as the Laundry manages to kick the Department of Work and Pensions out of their Kremlinesque palace on Quarry Hill, but Alex knows instinctively that the rival ministry is going to fight