Charles Stross: The Fuller Memorandum

I approach the anti-static point beside the nosewheel bay very cautiously: holding one end of a grounding strap at arm’s length in front of me, the other fist clutching the stopwatch behind my back, legs tensed, ready to run. The grounding strap is basically a long conductive wire; the other end is attached to a villainous black signal generator Hastings pulled from the field exorcism kit-all bakelite and flickering needles on dials, like something out of a 1950s Hammer Horror flick. There’s a small but bizarre diorama occupying the middle of the hastily cleared workbench it sits on: a model airplane from the souvenir shop, a rabbit’s foot, a key-ring fob skull pendant, and a diagram carefully sketched in conductive ink.

Look, this isn’t quite as spontaneously suicidal as it sounds. I don’t go anywhere these days without a defensive ward on a chain round my neck that’ll short out a class three offensive invocation, and Hastings is safely tucked away inside a grounded pentacle with Thoth-Lieberman geometry-he’s safe as houses, at least houses that aren’t sitting on top of a fault line wound up to let rip with a Richter 6.0 earthquake. As it happens, I do this kind of thing regularly, every week or so. It’s about as safe as a well-equipped fireman going into a smoldering inflammables store to spray cooling water across the overheating propane tank in the corner next to the mains power distribution board. Piece of cake, really-as long as somebody’s shut off the power.

“Are you centered?” I call over my shoulder to Hastings. “In the safety zone?”

“Yes.” He sounds bored. “How about you?”

“I’ll be okay.” I keep my eyes peeled as I shove the plug on the end of the strap into the anti-static point, and twist. I’ve plonked my PDA down on the floor a couple of meters away and set it to audio, beeping like a Geiger counter in the thaum field. It ticks every few seconds, like a cooling kettle. The airframe itself is probably safe, unlike the blue-glowing instrument panel on the workbench, but it’s a bigger physical hazard, which is why I’m tackling it first.

I take a couple of steps back, then straighten up and walk over to the signal generator. Where was I? Ah, yes. I flip a couple of switches and there’s a loud chime, almost like a bell ringing, except slightly off-key. It sets my teeth on edge. “Degaussing resonator on,” I say aloud. Continuing the checklist from memory: “Exclusion field engaged.” I pick up my PDA, fire up the ebook reader, and shuffle round the airframe slowly, reading aloud as I go: words in an alien tongue not suited for human lips. The signal generator chimes periodically. There’s your exorcism in a nut-shell: bell, book, and candle-although the candle is strictly optional if you’re reading from a backlit screen, and the bell’s a synthesized tone.

Finally, after squeezing between the Lightning and a tarp-shrouded jet engine on a trolley I fetch up where I started from, back by the workbench. “Last words.” I pick up the microphone that’s plugged into the signal generator, flip the switch, and say, “Piss off.”

There’s a bang and a blue flash from the grounding point on the airframe, and my PDA makes an ominous crackling noise. Then the thaum field dies. “You nailed it,” says Hastings.

“Looks that way,” I agree, turning to face him.

He looks past me. “What about the-Hey, what are you-”

Now here’s where things go wrong.

Muggins here didn’t bother to set up a ward around the workbench with the contaminated cockpit console before he sorted out the airframe, because he thought that he could do the two jobs separately. But they’re not separate, are they? The law of contagion applies: the cockpit instruments had been physically bolted to the airframe for a number of years, and things that form a unitary identity for a long time tend to respond as one.

More importantly, nobody had thought to tell Muggins precisely what Squadron 666, Royal Air Force, did with its planes. Escorting the white elephants. Muggins here still thought he was dealing with a simple spontaneous haunting-bad memories, terrified pilot in near-death experience, that sort of thing-rather than secondary activation caused by overexposure to gibbering unearthly horrors; the necromantic equivalent of collecting fallout samples by flying through mushroom clouds.

But I’m second-guessing the enquiry now, so I’ll shut up.

Warrant Officer Hastings survives the explosion because he is still inside his protective pentacle.

Muggins here survives the explosion because he is wearing a heavy-duty defensive ward around his neck and, in response to Hastings’s call, has turned to look at the open doorway where little old Helen with her tightly curled white hair is standing, clutching a tea tray.

Her mouth is open as if she’s about to say something, and her eyebrows are raised.

I will remember the expression on her face for a very long time.

Beauty may be skin-deep, but horror goes all the way down to the desiccated bone beneath, as the eerie purple flashbulb glow rises and her eyes melt in their sockets and her hair and clothes turn to dust, falling down and down as I begin to turn back towards the airframe and reach for the small pouch around my neck, which is scalding hot against my skin as the air heats up-

There’s a dissonant chime from the signal generator on the bench, unattended, then a continuous shrill ringing alarm as its safeties trip.

The hideous light goes out with a bang like a balloon bursting, a balloon the size of the Hindenburg.

“Shit,” I hear someone say as I grab the ward and feel a sharp pain in my hand. I blink furiously as I yank, breaking the fine chain. There’s a clicking in my ears and I blink again, see white powder everywhere-like snow or heavy dust on the floor, a patina of corrosion on the aircraft wings stacked in their jigs around me, white on the workbenches-

“Helen!” shouts Warrant Officer Hastings, stepping over the boundary of his protective perimeter.

I don’t need to look round to know it’s too late for her but I still cringe. I drop the ward and gasp as air touches the palm of my hand and the spot on my sternum that’s beginning to sting like a kicked wasps’ nest. My ears are ringing.

I turn back to the bench with the signal generator to check my PDA for the thaum field. Unwelcome surprises come in threes: Number one is, the bench is a centimeter deep in white dusty powder. Surprise number two is, my PDA has gone to meet its maker-it’s actually scorched and blackened, the case melted around one edge. And surprise number three-

A thin, wispy trickle of smoke is rising from behind the (scorched, naturally) canvas screens around the Lightning’s cockpit instruments-ground zero for the pulse of necromantic energy that has just seared through the hangar like a boiling propane vapor explosion.

Here’s Hastings, kneeling and clutching a dented steel teapot that looks as if it’s been sandblasted, sobbing over a pile of-

The ringing in my ears is louder, and louder still, and the big hangar doors crack open to admit a ray of daylight to the crypt and the howl of the airfield fire tender’s siren, but they’re too late.

I GET HOME LATE, REALLY LATE: SO LATE I END UP EXPENSING a taxi to take me into Birmingham to catch the last train, and another taxi home at the other end. Iris will probably give me a chewing out over it but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. The emergency response team kept me at the first aid post for a couple of hours, under observation, but I’m okay, really: just scooped out and full of a numinous sense of dread, looping on the bright purple flash as I looked round and saw the door opening, Helen standing there for a moment as the thaum field on the instrument console collapsed, sucking out the life from anything within a fifty-meter radius that wasn’t locked down and shielded.