Charles Stross - The Fuller Memorandum

“Do you want some water?” Her face is instantly concerned. I try to nod. She gets the message. “Julian, fetch Mr. Howard some water.” She doesn’t look at Mr. Headless-Shotgun as she issues the order: she’s focusing on me, with a strangely concerned look. “We wouldn’t want him to get dehydrated.”

“Yah. Er, Jonquil, should I fetch…?”

His hesitant question brings a smile to her face. “Yes, a little aperitif would be good. Bring it.”

Aperitif? I clear my throat as Julian Headless-Shotgun leaves through a door I can’t see. “Drinking before you take me to the All-Highest? Isn’t that a bit unwise?” It’s a calculated risk, but her pink court shoes are a bit less likely to do Mr. Kidney an injury than Julian’s size-twelve DMs.

“Oh, I’m not going to get drunk.” She gives a little giggle.

Mr. Blond clears his throat: “You’re the one who’s going to be drunk.”

“Oh do shut up, Gareth,” Jonquil says tiredly.

“I’m just trying to explain-”

“Yes, you’re very trying.” Her world-weary tone suggests to me that Mr. Blond is definitely from the B-Team-unlike Jonquil, who has proven frighteningly competent, so far. “Why don’t you go through Mr. Howard’s jacket pockets instead, in case he’s carrying any nasty surprises for us?”

“Yes, Dark Mistress. I live only to obey.”

I must be slow today because it takes several seconds for the coin to drop. “You’re not vampires, are you?” I ask, trying to stay calm; the prospect of falling into the clutches of the Brotherhood of the Black Pharaoh is quite bad enough without accidentally crossing the streams with a bunch of live-action Vampire: The Masquerade fans-and you can never be too sure. (Cultists aren’t usually noted for their tight grip on reality.)

“No!” She giggles again. “Vampires don’t exist! We’re just going to drink your blood and eat a teeny-tiny bit of your flesh, silly.”

I can’t help myself: I try and wriggle away from her. Which is fine as far as it goes, but as there’s a wall about half a meter behind my back I don’t get very far. “Why?” I manage to ask as Julian the Blood-Drinking Shotgun-Toting Cultist reappears with a bottle of Perrier, a scalpel, and a pair of unpleasantly fat syringes.

“Transubstantiation: it’s not just for Christians anymore!” She sits on my back to stop me squirming away from Julian, then takes the scalpel and lays my left sleeve open from cuff to elbow. “Be a good boy and I’ll let you have the water afterwards. This won’t hurt much, if you don’t struggle.”

She sticks me on the inside of the elbow with the first needle, and pokes around for a vein with expertise that is clearly born of much practice. I grit my teeth. “Won’t your All-Highest take exception to you sampling the buffet?”

“Mummy won’t mind,” she announces airily. “Next tube, Julian darling.” She stabs me again, and this time there’s a brief spark of searing pain as she nails a nerve. “It was her idea, actually,” she says confidingly. “If your active service units find us and try to set up a geas to immobilize everyone but you, the law of contagion will keep us moving.”

“Yeah,” echoes Gareth from the other side of the room, doing his dimwitted best to keep up with the program.

I boggle slightly. “Would it change your mind if I said I was HIVPOSITIVE?”

She pauses for a moment, then points her nose in the air. “No,” she says dismissively. “Mummy’s seen your medical records, she’d have said. Don’t tell lies, Mr. Howard, it will only get you into trouble.” She passes the second syringe-turgid with purplish-red blood-up to Julian, then raises the scalpel. “Now this will hurt!” she announces as she bends over me with a curiously intent expression.

I swear for a few seconds. Then I give in and scream.

AT SIX O’CLOCK, ANGLETON EMERGES FROM HIS OFFICE- where he has been inexplicably overlooked by the searchers for the entire duration of his “disappearance”-and stalks the darkening corridors of the New Annexe like the shade of vengeance incarnate. A humming cloud of dread follows him as he passes the empty offices and the taped-over doorway in the vaguely titled Ways and Means Department. My office is, of course, empty: Angleton has rearranged meeting schedules in the departmental Exchange database to ensure that certain players will be elsewhere when he makes his way to Room 366.

There’s a red light shining over the door, and a ward inscribed on the wood veneer beneath it glows gently green in defiance of the mundane rules of physics. Angleton ignores the DND light and the ward and enters. Faces turn. “James.” Boris’s face is ashen. “What are happen?”

(Boris isn’t Russian and the accent isn’t a fake; it’s a parting kiss from Krantzberg syndrome, brain damage incurred by performing occult operations on Mark One Plains Ape computing hardware-the human cerebral cortex. Magicians use computers because chips are easier to repair than brains which have had chunks scooped out by the Dee-space entities they accidentally let in when they began to think too hard about those symbols they were manipulating.)

“The baited trap has been sprung,” Angleton says lightly. He pulls out a chair and collapses into it like a loose bag of bones held together by his dusty suit. “Trouble is, our boy was holding the bait when they grabbed it.”

“Oh bugger.” Andy, tall and dandelion-haired as the famous graphic artist whose name he uses as an alias, looks distinctly displeased. “Do we know who they are yet?”

“Not yet.” Angleton plays a scale on the invisible ivories of the tabletop, his fingertips clattering like drumsticks. “I was expecting to reel them in at tomorrow’s BLOODY BARON meeting, but that might be too late.”

“Where’s Agent CANDID?”

Angleton grimaces. “I sent her on a little errand, en route to hook up with Alan Barnes and the OCCULUS unit. They’re on station in Black-heath, ready to hit the road as soon as we give them a target. I’ve gone to the Board: they authorized an escalation to Rung Three. I have accordingly put CO15 on notice to provide escort and routing.” CO15 is the Traffic Operational Command Unit of the London Metropolitan Police.

“MAGINOT BLUE STARS are in the loop and ready to provide covering fire if we need to go above Rung Five.” The notional ladder of escalation’s rungs are denominated in steps looted from Herman Kahn’s infamous theory of strategic conflict: in a good old-fashioned war, Rung Five would mark the first exchange of tactical nuclear weapons.

“Is it that bad?” Boris asks, needy for reassurance. Even old war horses sometimes balk in the face of a wall of pikes.

“Potentially.” Angleton stops finger-tapping. “CLUB ZERO is definitely getting ready to perform in London. The new research ‘findings’”-Andy flushes-“are out in the wild and widely believed, and with any luck they’ve swallowed them whole and are going for broke this time. They successfully stole a report on Agent CANDID’s weapon, which I admit I did not anticipate, and they think they’ve stolen the Fuller Memorandum.”

There’s a sharp intake of breath from Choudhury, whose previous stuffed-shirt demeanor has evaporated. “That’s what the break-in was about?”

Angleton nods. “As I said, the baited trap has been sprung. They’re going to try and steal the Eater of Souls, bind him to service and use him as a Reaper. I cannot be certain of this, but I believe their logical goal would be to break down the Wall of Pain that surrounds the Sleeper in the Pyramid. With the Squadron grounded we’ve had perilously little recon info on the state of the Sleeper for the past two years-the drone over-flights had to be suspended due to erratic flight control software glitches-and during CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, awakening the Sleeper will be an obvious goal for the cultists. Of course, the logical flaws in Dr. Ford’s report will take somewhat longer to come to light, and I am confident that even if they mounted such an attack it would fail, but the collateral civilian damage would be unacceptable to our political masters.” His smile is as ghastly as any nuclear war planner’s.