Was
see
He falls silent as he trudges along the passage.
“What happened to her?” I repeat.
Hastings shook his head. “You’d have to ask the doctors. I’m not sure they know; they say she might be safe to release next month, but they said that last month too.”
Another domino. “XR727 was one of the, uh, Squadron’s planes. Yes?”
“They didn’t brief you?” He doesn’t sound surprised. “In here, Mr. Houghton.” I don’t bother to correct him as he shoves open a side door and steps into an echoing, gloomy cavern of a room. “See for yourself.”
The room we’re in resembles an aircraft hangar the way a mausoleum in a graveyard resembles a bedroom. It’s dimly lit, daylight filtering through high windows, and the light reveals the mummified skeletons of half a dozen fast jets littering the oil-stained concrete floor. Their severed limbs are stacked in jigs and frames, their viscera embalmed in the canopic jars of parts bins—patiently awaiting resurrection, or at least reassembly into the semblance of life. There’s junk everywhere, toolboxes, rodent control traps, workbenches piled high with parts. Closest to the door hulks the fuselage of a Lightning. Its tail is missing, as are its outboard wing segments and the conical spike of its nose radar, but it’s substantially intact. Close up, the size of the thing is apparent: a pit bull to the chihuahua of an old Russian MiG—squat, brutal, built for raw speed. It’s big, too—the wing root high enough overhead to walk under without stooping.
Something about it makes me feel profoundly uneasy, as if a black cat has walked half the length of my grave, paused furtively, taken a crap, and been about its business before anyone noticed.
“This is Airframe XR727. According to the official records it was scrapped in 1983. Unofficially . . . it ended up here, because of its history: it’s a ringer, it was on the books with 23 squadron and 11 squadron, but they never saw it. It was working for you people. In the Squadron.” I shiver. The hangar’s weirdly, incongruously cold, given the bright summer afternoon outside. “It logged 280 hours on the other side, escorting the white elephants.”
Angleton mentioned a white elephant, didn’t he? I glance at the shadows under XR727’s belly. The concrete is stained and greasy with fluid, whorls and lines and disconnected nodes that swim before my eyes.
“Jesus, Angleton,” I mutter, and pull out my PDA.
and I pull up the thaumograph utility running on the rather nonstandard card in its second expansion slot. I point it at the swirling directed graph that the phantom hydraulic leak has dribbled across the concrete apron and the display flashes amber.
I take a slow step back from the airframe, and motion Hastings over. “I don’t want to alarm you,” I murmur. “But did you know your airframe is hot?”
Hastings shakes his head sadly. “Figures.” He shrugs. “Do you want to look at the cockpit instrumentation?”
I nod. “Just point me at it. Is it still where Marcia had her incident?”
“I haven’t moved it.” He gestures towards a canvas screen, surrounded by a circle of traffic cones with hazard tape strung between them. “Do you need any help?”
“I’m afraid I’m probably beyond help . . .” I advance on the traffic cones, PDA held in front of me. It begins to bleep and warble immediately. Edging sideways, I look round the canvas screen. There’s a workbench bearing a stack of black metal boxes, wires dangling, needles and dials glowing eerie blue—
Доступ к книге ограничен фрагменом по требованию правообладателя.
“I think that would be a very good idea,” I say with feeling, thinking,
anything
• You can explosively disassemble the airframe, if it’s in the middle of a desert and there are no neighbors within a couple of miles.
• You can violate any number of HSE directives and outrage public opinion by dumping it at sea—shallow waters only, we don’t want to annoy the owners by violating the Benthic Treaties—and wait for time (and electrolytes) to wash the memories away.
• You can truck it to a special hazardous waste certified recycling site in Wales, where they have a very special degaussing coil for exactly this purpose.
• Or, if you believe in living dangerously, you can do it with a soldering iron, a stopwatch, a grounding strap, and a good pair of running shoes in case you screw up.
Guess what Muggins here does?
Look, it’s a
They don’t exactly grow on trees: blowing it up and drowning it aren’t on the menu; shipping it to Wales would cost . . . Well, it wouldn’t fit on my discretionary expense worksheet: too many zeros (more than two). That leaves the grounding strap and the running shoes. So if you were in my place, what would
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.
bell, book, and candle
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—
More importantly, nobody had thought to tell Muggins precisely
Escorting the white elephants
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.
“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.