Charles Stross - The Fuller Memorandum

(Pause.) “Oh.”

“I think you’d better make sure that your greyhound hasn’t actually caught your hare. Otherwise the Auditors are going to be handling a couple more enquiries.”

(Icily.) “Are you threatening me?”

“You know better than that. I merely note that if Bob doesn’t make it home tonight we can assume that CLUB ZERO have him. Which would rather blow the wheels off your little game with the BLOODY BARON committee, wouldn’t it? Not to mention the collateral damage.”

(Pause.) “Yes.”

“So.” (Pause.) “What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to tell Major Barnes to put his merry men on notice-those of them who aren’t playing cowboys and indians in the hills above Kandahar. Then I’m going to locate Bob. Alan can take it from there.”

“I want to come along.”

“I wouldn’t dream of telling you to stay away, my dear, not with your specialist expertise. The problem is-”

“What problem?”

“I was building a waterproof case to hand over to Internal Affairs for prosecution before the Black Assizes. Trying to map the mole’s contacts. Cultists are fragile: if they commit suicide we may never find their accomplices.”

“Angleton. Would you rather lose Bob?”

“Hmm. If you must put it that way, no. But remember, in the endgame, we are all expendable.”

“I’m so glad to hear it.”

“As for you, would you like to make yourself useful?”

“How?”

“This little interruption has, as you reminded me, disrupted certain plans. But not, I hope, irretrievably. On your way to hook up with Alan’s boys and girls, I’d like you to go and have a glass of wine with a friend of mine, and convey a proposition to him. It’ll put me in his debt if he takes it, I’m afraid, but I think it’s necessary. I’ll email you the details.”

“Who are you talking about?”

“Nikolai Panin.”

(End of call log.)

I’M DREAMING.

I’m looking out across a wasteland of rolling ground, gray and crumbly as lunar regolith, beneath a starry sky. There’s no vegetation, not even stunted cacti or lichen crawling across the rocks that dot the ground. In the distance I see a low wall, writhing across the landscape like a dead snake: it’s as gray as the ground, too. The stars-

I can see at a glance that this is not Earth’s sky.

A lurid band of orange and green swirls across half the void, bisecting it with a smoky knife a million times brighter than the Milky Way. The stars sprinkled across it are eye-stabbingly visible, several of them as bright and red as Mars. They cast a harsh and pale radiance across the sloping desert floor. This is not the skyscape of a planet quietly orbiting a star in the suburban spiral arms of a regular galaxy-I’m looking at the view from a world much closer to the active core of a galaxy or globular cluster. And it’s an ugly, elderly galactic core, deep in the throes of senescence, a blaze of dust and gas spewing across the heavens from the dying exhalations of supernovae.

I try to turn my head, but my neck doesn’t want to work. It’s very strange-I can’t feel my body. I don’t seem to be breathing, or blinking, and I can’t feel my heartbeat-but I’m not afraid. Maybe I’m dead?

In the distance, so far away that I can barely see it, low down and close to the horizon, the landscape takes a rectilinear turn. A shallow pyramid or volcanic mound as symmetrical as Mount Fuji reaches for the sky. I’ve got no way of telling how high it is, but instinct tells me it’s vast, rising kilometers from the center of the flatlands. Something about it creeps me out, almost as much as the murdered sky. I’ve got a feeling about it, a sense of dreadful immanence. There’s something inside the pyramid, something that has no right to exist in this or any other universe. I shouldn’t be here, but the thing in the pyramid is even more out of its place and time. It’s contained, that I know, but why it might need to be contained-

“-Told you not to overdo the ether! Can’t you get anything right? If he’s dead-”

The words buzz around my ears like meaningless insects, distracting me from the watch on the sleeper. The sleeper needs watching, demands witnesses who will collapse its quantum states and render it inert, incarnate in bosonic mass. I’m here because I’m part of the watch. They’re scattered to either side of me, the White Baron’s victims, impaled on stainless steel spikes, dead and yet undead, watching the sleeper. A massive sacrifice planned by the architect of terror to keep-

“-Got the smelling salts? Good-”

I can feel the pain gnawing at my abdomen, a deep and terrible burning pressure, and I’m on the edge of understanding that something awful has been done to me just as a horrible stench of cat piss steals up my nostrils and I feel a twitching in my eyelids.

“Is he responding?”

I understood that.

Abruptly, the dead plateau and the nightmare watchers and the sleeper in the pyramid are a million lightyears away from the headache that’s stabbing at the back of my eyes, and the stench of ammoniacal smelling salts tickles my nose harshly, evoking a sneeze.

“Ah, that looks promising. Hello, Mr. Howard? Can you hear me?”

Fuck.

Suddenly wisps of memory slot into place. I find myself wishing I was back on the plateau, just another mummified corpse, another upright fencepost in the necromantic wall that hems in the pyramid. “Yuuuuh…” My mouth isn’t working right; I’m slobbering like an out-of-control drunk, drooling incontinently. I blink, and the buzzing I’ve only just noticed recedes as I sense light and movement and chaos and an outside world that is acquiring color again.

“He’s awake.” The woman’s voice is heavy with satisfaction. “All-Highest will be most pleased.” As words to wake to, those leave something to be desired; but beggars can’t be choosers. A boot nudges me in the vicinity of my right kidney. “You. Say something.”

“S-s-something.”

It’s not as classy as you’ll never get away with this or if it wasn’t for you interfering kids… but I have an idea that I wouldn’t enjoy Ms. Boot renewing her acquaintance with Mr. Kidney, and if there’s one thing extreme god-botherers of every stripe have in common, it’s that they don’t have any sense of humor at all where their beliefs are concerned.

“Ow.” That’s for my head, which is now telling me in no uncertain terms that I’m nursing a ten-vodka hangover. Oh, and my wrists are handcuffed in front of me. I blink again, trying to see where I am.

I’m lying on my side on a thin foam mattress that’s seen better days, in a small room with walls painted in that peculiar rotted cream color that landlords like to call Magnolia. They’ve removed my jacket while I was out for the count. There’s a cheap IKEA chest of drawers and wardrobe, and a sash window half-masked by thin cotton curtains. Apart from the lack of a bed it could be just about any anonymous rented room in a shared flat-that and the two B-Team goons. Mr. Headless-Shotgun-who has left his trench broom somewhere else-nudges me in the back; another guy (young, blond, probably the friend with the handcuffs) is watching from the far side of the room, while the woman from the cycle path the other night squats in front of me, peering at my face. She’s a twenty-something rosy-cheeked embryonic Sloane Ranger-the anti-goth incarnate-with bouncy ponytail and plumped-up lips quirking with humor beneath eyes utterly devoid of anything resembling pity. She probably shops in Harvey Nicks and dotes on her pony.

“It speaks,” she declares, in a home-counties accent so sharp you could cut glass with it. “Pharaoh be praised.”

Pharaoh? Bollocks. She’s an initiate. Inner circle, then, which means I am potentially in a tanker-load of trouble. I try to clear my throat, but my head’s throbbing and I still don’t have full muscle control back. (Ether is vile stuff, as Hunter Thompson noted.) “W-w-water.”