The Atrocity Archives (5 page)

I sniff, and decide to stop resisting the urge
to sidle away. "Metaphorically or sexually?"

An expression of deep puzzlement flits across
Fred's face. "What's that? Metawatchically? Nah. He's a bad-tempered
old bastard, that's all." He leans closer,
conspiratorially: "This is all beyond me, you know? Dunno why I'm on
this junket, our training budget is just way over the top. Got to use
the course credits or we lose them next year. Irene's off studying
Eunuch device drivers, whatever they are, and I got posted here. Luck
of the draw. But it doesn't mean anything to me, if you know what I
mean. You look like one of those intellectual types, though. You
probably know what's going on. You can tell me … "

"Eh?" I try to hide behind my coffee cup and
manage to burn my fingers. While I'm cursing, Fred somehow ends up
standing behind my left shoulder.

"See, Torsun in HR told me he was sending me
here, to learn to be the departmental system administrator so those
people in Support can't pull the wool over our eyes. But his
Vohlmanness keeps cracking these weird jokes about devils and knives
and things. Is he one of them satanists we got briefed on four years
ago, do you suppose?"

I boggle as discreetly as I can manage. "I'm not
sure you should be in this course. The material gets technical quickly
and it can be dangerous if you're not familiar with the appropriate
laboratory safety precautions. Are you sure you want to stay here?"

"Sure? I'm sure! 'Course I'm sure. But I ain't
too happy with the content. For one thing, where's all the stuff about
license terms and support? That comes first. I mean, pacts with the
devil is all very well, but I need to know who to phone for real
technical support. And has CESG certified all this stuff for use on
government networks?"

I sigh. "Go have a word with Dr. Vohlman," I
suggest, and—a trifle rudely—turn away. I know there's always one
person who's in the wrong course, but we're two days in and he still
hasn't figured it out—that's got to be some kind of record, hasn't it?

Everyone drinks up and the smokers magically
reappear from wherever they vanished to and we troop back into the
lecture theatre. Teacher—Dr. Vohlman—has rolled an archaic test bench
in; it looks like a couple of Tesla coils
fucking a Wheatstone bridge next to what I'll swear is a distributor
hub nicked from an old Morris Minor. The wiring on the pentacle is
solid silver, tarnished black with age.

"Right, better put your coffee cups down now,
because we're going to actually put some of the stuff we were
discussing before break into practice."

Vohlman is all business, attacking his
curriculum with the gusto of a born schoolteacher. "We're going to try
a lesser summoning, a type three invocation using these coordinates
I've sketched on the blackboard. This should raise a primary
manifestation of nameless horror, but it'll be a fairly
tractable
nameless horror as long as we observe sensible precautions. There will
be unpleasant visual distortions and some protosapient wittering, but
it's no more intelligent than a
News of the World
reporter—not
really smart enough to be dangerous. That's not to say that it's safe,
though—you can kill yourself quite easily by treating the equipment
with disrespect. Just in case you've forgotten, this current is
carrying fifteen amps at six hundred volts, and the baseboard is
insulated and oriented correctly along a north-south magnetic axis. The
geometry we're using for this run is a modified Minkowski space that we
can derive by setting pi to four; there's no fractal dimension
involved, but things are complicated slightly because the space to
which we're mapping this diagram has a luminiferous aether. Gather
round, please, you need to be inside the security cordon when I power
up the circuit. Manesh, if you could switch on the
ABSOLUTELY NO ENTRY
sign … "

We gather round the test bench. I hover near the
back. I've seen similar experiments before: in fact, I've done much
more exotic ones in the basement back at Chateau Cthulhu. Compared to
the insanely complex summonings Brains assembles inside his laser grid
this is introductory level stuff, just an official checkpoint on my
personnel record. (Did I tell you about the friend of mine who was
turned down for a job as a trainee scientific officer because he was
unqualified? His Ph.D. was no good—the job
description said "three GCSE passes" and he'd long since lost all his
high school certificates. That's the way the civil service works.)

Still, it's interesting to watch the other
students in this course. Babs, blonde bubble-and-squeak with big-framed
spectacles, is treating the bench like an unexploded bomb; I think
she's new to this and still too much under the influence of
The
Exorcist,
probably expects heads to start spinning round and green
slime to start spewing at any moment. (Vohlman should have told the
students that's what we keep the Ectoplasm Wallahs around for.
Impresses the brass no end. But that's another course.) John, Manesh,
Dipak, and Mike are behaving just like bored junior technical staff on
another week-away-from-the-desk-is-as-good-as-a-holiday training
course. Fred from Accounting looks confused, as if he's mislaid his
brain, and Callie's found a pressing reason to go powder her nose.
Can't say I blame her; this kind of experiment is fun, the same way
that demonstrating a thermite reaction in a chemistry lab is fun—it
can
blow up in your face. I make damn sure that the electrical fire
extinguisher is precisely two paces behind me and one pace to my right.

"Okay, everybody pay attention. Don't, whatever
happens, touch the grid. Don't, under any circumstances, say anything
once I start. Don't, on pain of your life, step outside the red circle
on the floor—we're on top of an earthed cage here, but if we go
outside
it—"

Topology is everything. The idea of a summoning
is simple: you create an attractor node at point A. You put the
corresponding antinode at point B. You stand in one of 'em, energize
the circuit, and something appears at the other. The big "gotcha" is
that a human observer is required—you can't do it by remote control.
(Insert some quantum cat mumbo-jumbo about "collapsing the wave
function" and "Wigner's Friend versus the Animal Liberation Front"
here.) Better hope you picked the right circle to stand in, otherwise
you're going to learn far more than you ever wanted to know about
applied topology—like how the universe looks when
you're turned inside-out.

It's not quite as bad as it sounds. For added
security, you can superimpose the attractor node and the safety cell,
locking in the summoned agency—which means they shouldn't be able to
get to us at the antinode. Which is why Herr Doktor Vohlman mit der
duelling scars unt ze bad attitude has plonked the test bench right in
the middle of the red pentagram painted on the lecture theatre floor
and is enjoining us all to stand tight.

Of course, to get to the fire extinguisher I'd
have to step out of the circle … 

"Is this practice approved by the Health and
Safety officer?" Fred asks.

"Quiet, please." Vohlman shuts his eyes,
obviously psyching himself up for the activation sequence. "Power." He
shoves a knife switch over and a light comes on. "Circuit two." A
button is depressed. "Is there anybody there?"

Green vapour seems to swirl at the edges of my
vision as I focus on the pentagram of silver wire. Lights glow beneath
it, set in a baseboard made of timber harvested from a (used) gallows;
setup is everything.

"Three." Vohlman pushes another button, then
pulls a twist of paper out of his pocket. Tearing it, he exposes a
sterile lancet which he shoves into the ball of his left thumb without
hesitation. The hair on the back of my neck is standing on end as he
shakes his hand at the attractor and a bead of blood flicks away from
it, bounces off the air above one wire, rolls back toward the
centre—and hovers a foot above it, vibrating like a liquid ruby
beneath
the fluorescent lights.

"Is anybody there?" mimics Fred. Abruptly his
face crinkles in a grin. "Good joke! I almost believed it for a
minute!" He reaches out toward the drop of blood and I can feel vast
forces gathering in the air around us—and all of a sudden I can feel a
headache coming on, like the tension before an electrical storm.

"No!" squeaks Babs, realising it's too late to
stop him even as she speaks.

I see Vohlman's face. It's a mask of pure
terror: he doesn't dare move a muscle to stop Fred because touching
Fred will only spread the contagion. Fred is already lost and the last
thing you do to someone who's in contact with high tension is grab them
to pull them away—that is, if you do it, it's the last thing you'll
ever
do.

Fred stands still, and his jacket sleeve
twitches as if his muscles are writhing underneath it. His hand is over
the attractor, and the drop of blood begins to drift 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 right, and I think you've just demonstrated
the capability. To the extent that it's my call, you've got it"—he
stands up—"if you want it."

I stand up too. "I'll think about it," I say,
and I walk out the door before I start mouthing obscenities, because I
can't get Fred's expression out of my head. I've never seen someone die
before. Funny, isn't it? Most of us go through life and never really
see someone die, much less die violently. I should be on a high,
knowing that I'm going to qualify for field ops, and if this interview
had happened yesterday I would be. But now I just want to throw up in a
corner.

Brains is in the kitchen when I get home, attempting to cook an
omelette without breaking the eggshell.

It's raining, and my jacket is drenched from the
short run between the tube station and the front door; give thanks once
more to the invisible boon of contact lenses, without which I would be
staring at the world through streak-befuddled spectacles. "Hi," says
Brains. "Can you hold this for me?"