Read Online The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Charles Stross
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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 …
I stand up and lean over the thing. Yes, it's
starfish-shaped: radial symmetry, five-fold order. Seems to be a
fossil, some kind of greenish soapstone. Then I look closer. I know
that only two hundred miles away most of the nuclear reactors in Europe
are sitting on the Normandy coast, where the prevailing winds would
blow a fallout plume out toward us. (And you wonder why the British
government insists on keeping its nuclear weapons?) Nevertheless, this
is weirder than any radiation mutant has a right to be. Each tentacle
tip is slightly truncated; the whole thing looks like a cross-section
through a sea cucumber. It must be a representative of
an older order, a living fossil left over from some weird family of
organisms mostly rendered extinct by the Cambrian biodiversity
catastrophe—when the structures that lie buried two kilometres below a
nameless British Antarctic Survey base were built.
I stare at the fossil, because it seems like an
omen. A thing transported from its natural environment, washed up and
left to die on an alien beach beneath the gaze of creatures
incomprehensible to it: that's a good metaphor for humanity in this
age, the humanity that the Laundry is sworn to defend. Never mind the
panoply of state and secrecy, the cold-war trappings of village and
security cordon—what it's about, when you get down to it, is this: our
appalling vulnerability, collectively, before the onslaught of beings
we can barely comprehend. A lesser one, not even one of the great Old
Ones, would be enough to devastate a city; we play under the shadow of
forces so sinister that a momentary relaxation of vigilance would see
all that is human blotted out.
I can go back to London, and they will let me go
back to my desk and my stuffy cubicle and my job fixing broken office
machines. No recriminations, just a job for life and a pension in
thirty-years time in return for a promise of silence to the grave. Or I
can go back to the office in the village and sign the piece of paper
that says they can do whatever they like with me. Unthanked, possibly
fatal service, anywhere in the world: called on to do things which may
well be repugnant, and which I will never be able to talk about. Maybe
no pension at all, just an unmarked grave in some isolated defile on a
central Asian plateau, or a sock-shod foot washed up, unaccompanied, on
a Pacific beach one morning while the crabs dine heavy. Nobody ever
volunteered for field ops because of the pay and conditions. On the
other hand …
I look at the starfish-thing and see eyes, human
eyes, with worms moving inside them, and I realise that there is no
choice. Really, there never was a choice.
3. DEFECTOR
Three months later to the
nearest minute I am loosely attached to the US desk, working on
my first field assignment. This would normally be an extremely
stressful point in my career, except that this is very much a
low-stress training mission, as Santa Cruz is one of the nicest parts
of California, and right now having my fingernails pulled out by the
Spanish Inquisition would be more pleasant than putting up with Mhari.
So I'm making the most of it, sitting in a tacky bar down on a seaside
pier, nursing a cold glass of Santa Cruz Brewing Company wheat beer,
and watching the pelicans practice their
(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 …
I stand up and lean over the thing. Yes, it's
starfish-shaped: radial symmetry, five-fold order. Seems to be a
fossil, some kind of greenish soapstone. Then I look closer. I know
that only two hundred miles away most of the nuclear reactors in Europe
are sitting on the Normandy coast, where the prevailing winds would
blow a fallout plume out toward us. (And you wonder why the British
government insists on keeping its nuclear weapons?) Nevertheless, this
is weirder than any radiation mutant has a right to be. Each tentacle
tip is slightly truncated; the whole thing looks like a cross-section
through a sea cucumber. It must be a representative of
an older order, a living fossil left over from some weird family of
organisms mostly rendered extinct by the Cambrian biodiversity
catastrophe—when the structures that lie buried two kilometres below a
nameless British Antarctic Survey base were built.
I stare at the fossil, because it seems like an
omen. A thing transported from its natural environment, washed up and
left to die on an alien beach beneath the gaze of creatures
incomprehensible to it: that's a good metaphor for humanity in this
age, the humanity that the Laundry is sworn to defend. Never mind the
panoply of state and secrecy, the cold-war trappings of village and
security cordon—what it's about, when you get down to it, is this: our
appalling vulnerability, collectively, before the onslaught of beings
we can barely comprehend. A lesser one, not even one of the great Old
Ones, would be enough to devastate a city; we play under the shadow of
forces so sinister that a momentary relaxation of vigilance would see
all that is human blotted out.
I can go back to London, and they will let me go
back to my desk and my stuffy cubicle and my job fixing broken office
machines. No recriminations, just a job for life and a pension in
thirty-years time in return for a promise of silence to the grave. Or I
can go back to the office in the village and sign the piece of paper
that says they can do whatever they like with me. Unthanked, possibly
fatal service, anywhere in the world: called on to do things which may
well be repugnant, and which I will never be able to talk about. Maybe
no pension at all, just an unmarked grave in some isolated defile on a
central Asian plateau, or a sock-shod foot washed up, unaccompanied, on
a Pacific beach one morning while the crabs dine heavy. Nobody ever
volunteered for field ops because of the pay and conditions. On the
other hand …
I look at the starfish-thing and see eyes, human
eyes, with worms moving inside them, and I realise that there is no
choice. Really, there never was a choice.
3. DEFECTOR
Three months later to the
nearest minute I am loosely attached to the US desk, working on
my first field assignment. This would normally be an extremely
stressful point in my career, except that this is very much a
low-stress training mission, as Santa Cruz is one of the nicest parts
of California, and right now having my fingernails pulled out by the
Spanish Inquisition would be more pleasant than putting up with Mhari.
So I'm making the most of it, sitting in a tacky bar down on a seaside
pier, nursing a cold glass of Santa Cruz Brewing Company wheat beer,
and watching the pelicans practice their
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