The Fuller Memorandum Read Online Free PDF Page A

white powder everywhere—like snow or heavy dust on the floor, a patina of corrosion on the aircraft wings stacked in their jigs around me, white on the workbenches—
    “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.
    (Hangar Six isn’t going to have a rat problem for a while.)
    The unshielded instrument console entangled with the shielded airframe I’d just exorcised. And the seventy-something lady in the pink slippers, shuffling forward with a tea tray and two mugs she’d carefully poured for us—
    Too clever by half.
    As I open the front door, I can feel the house sulking. I switch on the lights and hang up my coat in the hall, fighting the urge to hunch my shoulders defensively. It’s Mo, of course. This is her house as much as it’s mine—okay, it’s our maisonette, two civil servants can’t possibly afford a house in London even if they’re both management track—and it reflects her mood. I canceled Pete and Sandy but I can’t cancel Mo. She’s got a snit on, perfectly justifiable. I really ought to go upstairs and apologize, but as I bend down to untie my shoelaces I find my hands are shaking.
    An indeterminate time later I open my eyes. I’m sitting at the kitchen table with an empty glass in my hand. The quality of the light just changed.
    “Bob?” It’s Mo, wearing a dressing gown, rubbing her eyes. “Shit. Bob”—her tone of voice changes, softening slightly—“what’s wrong?”
    “I—” I clear my throat, force air through my larynx: “I screwed up.”
    The bottle of Talisker sitting beside my left hand is half-empty. Mo peers at it, then takes a step closer and peers at me. Then she picks up the bottle, pops the cork, and pours a generous two fingers into my glass, bless her.
    “Drink up.” She pauses with a hand on the back of the other kitchen chair. “Am I going to need one too?”
    “Dunno. Maybe.”
    She goes to the cupboard and takes out another glass before she sits down. I blink at her, red-eyed and confused.
    “Talk.” She pours a