The Atrocity Archives (7 page)

The full package is a course in law and ethics
(including International Relations 101: "Do whatever the nice man with
the diplomatic passport tells you to do unless you want to start World
War Three by accident."), the correct use of petty cash receipts,
basic
tailing and surveillance, timesheets, how to tell when you're being
T&S'd, travel authorisation requests, locks and security systems,
reconciliation and write-offs, police relations ("Your warrant card
will get you out of most sticky situations, if they give you time to
show it."), computer security (roll around the floor, laughing),
software purchase orders, basic thaumaturgic security (ditto), and use
of weapons (starting with the ironclad rule: "Don't, unless you have to
and you've been trained."). And so I find myself down on the range
with
Harry the Horse, a middle-aged guy with an eye patch and thinning white
hair who thinks nothing of blowing things away with a submachine gun
but seems somewhat startled at my expertise with a HOG-3.

"Right." Harry ejects the magazine from his gun
and places it carefully on the bench. "I think we'll keep you off the
firearms list then, and pencil you in for
training to COWEU-2—certification of weaponry expertise,
unconventional, level two. Permission to carry unconventional devices
and use them in self-defence when authorised on assignment to hazardous
duty. I take it that bullseye wasn't an accident?"

I pick up the hand and remember to disarm it
this time. "Nope. You realise you don't need an anthropoid for this?
Ever wondered why there are so many one-legged pigeons in central
London?"

Harry shakes his head. "You young 'uns. Back
when I was getting going we used to think the future would be all
lasers and food pills and rockets to Mars."

"It's not that different," I remonstrate. "Look,
it's a science. You try using a limb from someone who died of motor
neurone disease or MS and you'll find out in a hurry! What we're doing
is setting up a microgrid that funnels in an information gate from
another contiguous continuum. Information gates are, like, easy; with a
bit more energy we can crank it open and bring mass through, but that's
more hazardous so we don't do it very often. The demonic
presences—okay, the extraterrestrial sapient fast-thinkers on the
other
side—try to grab control over the proprioceptive nerves they can sense
the layout of on the other side of the grid. The nerves are dead, like
the rest of the hand, but they still act as a useful channel. So the
result is an information pulse, raw information down around the Planck
level, that shows up to us as a phase-conjugated beam of coherent
light—"

I point the hand at the downrange target. Two
smoking feet.

"What will you do if you ever have to point that
thing at another human being?" Harry asks quietly.

I put it back on the rack hastily. "I really
hope I'm never put in that position," I say.

"That's not good enough. Say they were holding
your wife or kids hostage—"

"The enquiry hasn't been held yet," I reply. "So
I don't know if I've still got a job. But I hope I never get put in
that kind of position again."

I try to keep my hands from shaking as I padlock
the case and reactivate the ward field. Harry looks at me thoughtfully
and nods.

"Committee of Enquiry will
come to order."

I shuffle the papers in front of me, for no very
good reason other than to conceal my nervousness.

It's a small conference room, walled in thick
oak panels and carpeted in royal blue. I've just been called in:
they're grilling people in order of who was there and who was
responsible, and after Vohlman I'm number two. (He was running the
course and conducted the summoning; I merely terminated it.) I don't
recognise the suits sitting behind the table, but they look senior, in
that indefinable way that somehow says, "I've got my KCMG; how long
until you get yours?" The third is a senior mage from the Auditors,
which would be enough to make my blood run cold if I were guilty of
anything worse than stealing paper clips.

They ask me to stand on the centre of the crest
of arms in the carpet: sewn with gold thread, some kind of Latin motto,
very nice. I feel the hairs on my arms prickle with static and I know
it's live.

"Please state your name and job title." There's
a recorder on the desk and its light is glowing red.

"Bob Howard. Darkside hacker, er, Technical
Computing Officer grade 2."

"Where were you on Thursday the nineteenth of
last month?"

"Er, I was attending a training course:
Introduction to Applied Occult Computing 104, conducted by Dr.
Vohlman."

The balding man in the middle makes a doodle on
his pad then fixes me with a cold stare. "Your
opinion of the course?"

"My—er?" I freeze for a moment; this isn't in
the script. "I was bored silly—um, the course was fine, but it was a
bit basic. I was only there because Harriet was pissed off at me for
coming in late after putting in a twenty-hour shift. Dr. Vohlman did a
good job, but really it was insanely basic and I didn't learn anything
new and wasn't paying much attention—"
Why am I saying this?

The man in the middle looks at me again. It's
like being under a microscope; I feel the back of my neck burst out in
a cold, prickly sweat. "When you weren't paying attention, what were
you doing?" he demands.

"Daydreaming, mostly." What's going on? I can't
seem to stop myself answering everything they ask, however
embarrassing. "I can't sleep in lecture theatres and you can't read a
book when there are only eight students. I kept an ear open in case he
said something interesting but mostly—"

"Did you bear Frederick Ironsides any ill will?"

My mouth is moving before I can get control: "Yes. Fred was a
fuckwit. He kept asking me stupid questions, was too
dumb to learn from his own mistakes, made work for other people to mop
up after him, and held a number of opinions too tiresome to list. He
shouldn't have been in the course and I told him to tell Dr. Vohlman,
but he didn't listen. Fred was a waste of airspace and one of the most
powerful bogon emitters in the Laundry."

"Bogons?"

"Hypothetical particles of cluelessness. Idiots
emit bogons, causing machinery to malfunction in their presence. System
administrators absorb bogons, letting the machinery work again. Hacker
folklore—"

"Did you kill Frederick Ironsides?"

"Not deliberately—yes—you've got my
tongue—no—dammit, he did it himself! Damn fool shorted out the
containment wards during a practical so I hit him with the
extinguisher, but only after he was possessed.
Self-defence. What kind of spell is this?"

"No opinions, Robert, facts only and just the
facts, please. Did you hit Frederick Ironsides with the fire
extinguisher because you hated him?"

"No, because I was scared shitless that the
thing in his head was going to kill us all. I don't hate him—he's just
a bore but that isn't a capital offence. Usually."

The woman on his right makes a note on her pad.
My inquisitor nods: I can feel chains of invisible silver holding my
tongue still, chains binding me to the star chamber carpet I stand
upon. "Good. Just one more question, then. Of the students on your
training course, who least belonged there?"

"Me." Before I can bite my tongue, the
compulsion forces me to finish the sentence: "I could have been
teaching it."

The sea crashes on the shore
endlessly, a grey continuum of churning water that meets the sky
halfway to infinity. Shingle crunches as I walk along what passes for a
beach here, past the decaying graveyard that topples gently down the
slope to the waters below. (Every year the water claims another foot
off the headland; Dunwich is slowly sinking beneath the waves, until
finally the church bells will toll with the tide.)

Seagulls scream and whirl and snap in the air
above me like dervishes.

I came here on foot to get away from the
dormitory and the training units and the debriefing offices built from
what used to be two rows of ramshackle cottages and a big farmhouse.
There are no roads in or out of Dunwich; the Ministry of Defence took
over the entire village back in 1940 and redirected the local lanes,
erasing it from the map and the collective consciousness of Norfolk as
if it never existed. Ramblers are repulsed by the thick hedges that
surround us on two sides and the cliff that protects its third flank.
When the Laundry inherited Dunwich from MI5, they
added subtler wards; anyone approaching cross-country will begin to
develop a deep sense of unease a mile or so outside the perimeter. As
it is, the only way in or out is by boat—and our watery friends will
take care of any unwelcome visitors smaller than a nuclear submarine.

I need space to think. I've got a lot to think
about.

The Board of Enquiry found that I was not
responsible for the accident. What's more, they approved my transfer to
active status, granted my course completion certificate, and blew
through the department like a hot desert wind driving stinging
sand-grains of truth before it. With their silver-tongue bindings and
executive authority the old broom swept clean and left everything
behind tidy—if a little shaky, with all the nasty unwashed linen
exposed to the cold-eyed view of authority. I would not have liked to
answer to their jackal-headed servitors if I were guilty. But, as Andy
pointed out, if being a smart-arse was an offence, the Laundry would
not exist in the first place.

Mhari moved back into my room after the night of
the party and I haven't dared tell her to move back out again. So far
she hasn't thrown anything at me or threatened to slash her wrists, in
any particular order. (Two months ago, the last time she polled my
suicide interrupt queue, I was so pissed off I just said, "Down, not
across," using a fingernail to demonstrate. That's when she broke the
teapot over my head. I should have taken that as a warning sign.)

What I've got to think about now is a lot
larger. The business with Fred was a real eye-opener. Do I still want
to put my name on the active service list? Join the Dry Cleaners, visit
strange countries, meet exotic people, and cast death spells at them?
I'm not sure anymore. I
thought
I was sure, but now I know it
amounts to shivering in a rainstorm most of the time and having to
watch people with worms waggling behind their eyes the rest of it. Is
this what I want to do with my life?

Maybe. And then again, maybe not.

There's a large boulder on the shingle ahead of
me; beyond it, a decaying upside-down boat marks the no-go border
within our security perimeter. This is as far away as I can get without
tripping alarms, drawing down security attention, and generally looking
stupid in public. I place a hand on the boulder; it's heavily weathered
and covered in lichen and barnacles. I sit on it and look back down the
beach, back toward Dunwich and the training complex. For a moment, the
world looks hideously solid and reliable, almost as if the comforting
myths of the nineteenth century were true, and everything runs on
clockwork in an orderly, unitary cosmos.

Somewhere down in the village, Dr. Malcolm
Denver is undergoing induction briefings, orientation lectures,
shoesize measurements, pension adjustments, and being issued with his
departmental toothpaste tube and identification dog tags. He's probably
still a bit pissed off, the way I was four years ago when I was pulled
in after someone—they never told me who—caught me systematically
dumpster-diving through files that were off-limits but inadequately
guarded from network infiltration. It was really just a summer vacation
job between finishing my CS degree and starting postgrad work: making
ends meet doing contract work for the Department of Transport. I smelt
a rat in the woodpile and began to dig, never quite suspecting the full
magnitude of the rodent whose tail I had grabbed hold of. I was pissed
off at first, but over the following four years, spent immersed in the
Laundry Basket—our strange collective ghetto of secret knowledge—I
acquired the basics of this calling. Thaumaturgy is quite as
fascinating as number theory, thank you very much, the hermetic
disciplines descended from Trismegistus as engrossing as the sciences
he dabbled in. But do I want to dedicate myself to working in a secret
field for life?

I can't very well go back to civvy street;
they'll let me if I ask nicely, but only as long as I agree to have
nothing to do with a wide range of occupations—including everything I
can possibly earn a living at. This will cause
problems, family problems as well as money problems—mum will probably
ignore me and dad will yell about slacking and layabout hippies. Having
a son in the civil service suits them down to the ground: they both get
to ignore the inconvenient evidence of their mistaken marriage and
carry on with their lives, secure in the knowledge that at least they
did the parental thing successfully. Meanwhile, I haven't served long
enough to earn a pension yet. I suppose I could stagnate in tech
support indefinitely, or mutate into management; a generous portion of
the Laundry's payroll is devoted to buying the silence of incompetent
lambs, manufacturing work for people who need something to fill the
time between their first, accidental exposure and final retirement.
(There's nothing kindhearted about this; bumping off talkative voices
is an expensive, dangerous business with hideous political consequences
if you get caught, and it makes for an unpleasant working environment.
Paying dead wood to sit at a desk and not rock the boat is
comparatively cheap and painless.) But I'd like to think life isn't
quite so … meaningless.

Seagulls wheel and squawk overhead. There's a
faint thud behind me; one of them has dropped something on the beach. I
turn round to watch, just in case the bastards are trying to
toilet-bomb me. At first glance that's what it looks like: something
small, like a starfish, and faintly green. But on closer
inspection …