Charles Stross - The Fuller Memorandum

“I thought you were going to roast them at one point.”

“Sorry, I’m chicken.”

She sighs. “You don’t need to apologize for your parents, Bob. They’ll get over it eventually.”

“They’re not to know.” I glance back over my shoulder. “We could, you know. There’s still time. If you want.”

“Time to fit in all the heartbreak and pain of raising wee ones so they’re just old enough to appreciate the horror of it all? No thanks.”

We’ve had this conversation before, a few times: revisited the situation for an update. No, the world we work in isn’t a suitable one to inflict on a child you love.

“Besides, you’re not the one who’d have to go through a first pregnancy in your late thirties.”

“Certainly not just to please them.”

We walk back to the station in morose silence, a thirty-something couple out for a Sunday afternoon stroll; nobody watching us needs to know that we’re pissed off, armed, and on the lookout for trouble.

It’s probably a very good thing indeed for the local muggers that they’re still sleeping off their Saturday night hangovers.

MONDAY DAWNS BRIGHT AND HOT AND EARLY, AND I FIND MY SELF waking to the happy knowledge that I can go back to work, and nobody will order me home. I roll over, feel the cooling depression across the mattress-continue my roll and sit up, relieved, on the wrong side of the bed.

Mo’s clearly been up for a while: when I catch up with her in the kitchen she’s listlessly spooning up a bowl of yogurt and gerbil food. I attend to the cafetière. She’s wearing what I think of as her job-interview suit. “What’s up?” I ask.

“Need to look the part for an off-site.” She frowns. “Do you think this looks businesslike?”

“Very.” She looks like she’s about to foreclose on my mortgage. I spill coffee grounds all over the worktop, finish spooning the brown stuff into the jug, and add boiling water. “What kind of meeting?”

“Got to see a man about a violin. Conservation.”

“Conservation…?”

“They don’t grow on trees, you know.” The frown relaxes: “It’s not something common like a Stradivarius. We’ve got three on inventory, but only twelve were ever made and they’re all unavailable for one reason or another. A couple got bombed during the war, three are unaccounted for-presumed lost during extra-dimensional excursions-and the rest belong to other agencies or collectors we can’t touch. Operational Assets are looking for a supplier who can make more of them, but it’s turning out to be really difficult. Nobody is quite sure of the order in which Zahn applied his bindings; and as for what it’s made of, just owning the necessary supplies probably puts you in breach of the Human Tissues Act of 2004, not to mention a raft of other legislation.”

“Ow.” I look at the battered violin case, propped up in the corner next to the recyclables bin. That’s the trouble with a defense policy based on occult weapons: the sort of folks who make magic swords can rarely be bothered with the BS 5750 quality certification required by government procurement committees. “So what are you doing?”

“Carting my violin across town so an expert can examine it.” She finishes her cereal bowl. “A restorer, very expensive, very exclusive. The cover story is I’m working for one of the big auction houses and we’ve been commissioned to get an estimate of its worth-don’t look at me like that, they do this all the time, for stuff they don’t have any in-house expertise with. I’ve got to go along because our other two violins are booked solid, and I’m not letting this one out of my sight…” She eyes the coffeepot. “What are you planning?”

“Got to go see Iris after her morning meeting, then we’ll see.” My cheek twitches as I pour two mugs of coffee. “Got some files to read. Angleton told me to deputize for him on a committee. Then there’s the structured cabling in D Block to worry about. The glamorous life of the secret agent, when he’s not actually out there saving the world… I was thinking, that story Andy came up with-do you want to look into it? Sanity-check Dr. Ford’s analysis?” I finish the question slowly, trying not to think too hard about the implications.

“You read my mind.” She adds milk to her coffee, stirring. “Not that everybody else in Research and Development with CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN won’t be doing exactly the same thing, but you never know. I think I’ll go pay Mike a little visit this afternoon, if he’s got time.” She looks at me, eyes wide. They’re blue-green, I notice; it’s funny, that: I don’t usually pay attention to her eyes. “Are you all right?”

I nod. “Just a little unfocused today.”

“You and me both.” She manages a little laugh by way of conversational punctuation. “Well, I need to be off.” She takes a too-big mouthful of coffee and winces. “Sorry I’m leaving you with the washing up again.”

“That’s okay, I’ve got an extra hour.” No point showing up before Iris’s steering group meeting, is there? “Take care.”

“I will.” She picks up her handbag and the violin case and heads for the door, heels clicking: “Bye,” and she’s away, looking more like an accountant than a combat epistemologist.

I putter around for a while, then get dressed (jeans, tee shirt, gun belt, and linen blazer-mine is not a customer-facing job at present, and I hate ties) and prepare to head out. At the last minute I remember the NecronomiPod, sleeping (but not dead) beside the laptop. I grab it along with my usual phone and head for the bus stop.

“WELCOME TO BLOODY BARON,” SAYS IRIS, OFFERING ME A recycled cardboard folder with MOST SECRET stamped on the cover: “You have two hours to familiarize yourself with the contents before the Monday afternoon team meeting.”

She smiles brightly as she drops it on my desk, right on top of the archive box full of dusty paperwork that I’ve just signed for, care of the wee man with the handcart who does the twice-daily run to the stacks: “There will be an exam. On the upside, I’ve given your structured cabling files to Peter-Fred and the departmental email security awareness committee meeting for Wednesday is canceled due to illness-Jackie and Vic are spouting from both ends, apparently, and aren’t expected in until next week-so you’ve got some breathing space.”

“Thanks.” I try not to groan. “I’ll try not to obsess about Peter-Fred fucking up the wiring loom too much.”

“Don’t worry.” She waves a hand vaguely: “The cabling’s all going to be outsourced from next year anyhow.”

That gets my attention. “Outsourced?” I realize that shouting might deliver entirely the wrong message about my suitability for return to work and moderate my voice: “There are four, no, five, no-several, very good reasons why we do our own cabling, starting with security and ending with security. I really don’t think outsourcing it is a very good idea at all, unless it’s the kind of outsourcing which is actually insourcing to F Division via a subcontractor arrangement to satisfy our PPP quota requirements…”

And that’s another ten minutes wasted, bringing Iris up to speed on one of the minutiae of my job. It’s not her fault she doesn’t know where the dividing line between IT support scut-work and OPSEC protocol lies, although she catches on fast when I explain the predilection of class G3 abominations for traveling down Cat 5e cables and eating clerical staff, not to say anything about the ease with which a bad guy could stick a network sniffer on our backbone and do a man-in-the-middle attack on our authentication server if we let random cable installers loose under the floor tiles in the new building.

Finally she leaves me alone, and I open the cover on BLOODY BARON and start reading.