The Rhesus Chart Read Online Free PDF

paper backing. I tried to look at the remaining ones but they gave me a stabbing pain behind my right eye.
    “The thing on the other side of the door is pretty dumb,” I said. “I think I can take it out, if we open the door, but it’ll be touch-and-go. And if it’s actually inside the office, rather than on the other side of a portal with its end point in the office, it might make a mess of—”
    “Leave that to me.” Angleton hefted his book of stickers. “Harrumph. What do you propose to do?” I told him. “Harrumph,” he said again, and considered the idea for a few seconds before nodding. “Yes, you do that, Bob. I’ll sign off on the forms for the replacement kit tomorrow.”
    “Okay,” I said. Turned towards the cowering crowd of Residual Human Resources. “Here’s how we’ll do it. Eenie, meenie, minie, mo, catch a zombie by the—”
    I reached out with my mind and
grabbed
. He came, shuffling, reluctantly: an older, more withered corpse, wearing the dress uniform of a funereal military policeman. The original owner of the body was long dead. What held it upright now was a feeder in the night, a weak demon with a tendency to embed itself in (and take over) the neural connectome of its victims. I think it knew that I had a fate in mind for it, and not a pleasant one, but it was bound into the body by a geas, a compact of power that required it to obey my lawful commands.
“Hear ye this,”
I said, in my halting Old Enochian:
“define new subroutine basilisk_grenade() as callback from operator(); begin; depress red button on front of payload; aim payload at self->face(); walk forward for ten paces; halt and retain physical control of payload indefinitely . . .”
    I set the self-portrait timer on the camera to ten seconds, handed it to the zombie, and sent him into the grid and through the door to blow himself up. Then things got weird.
     • • • 
    ABOUT THAT STICKER BOOK:
    “I want you to turn off the outer ward, boy,” he told me. “Then shove your zombie inside and turn it on again. And after another fifteen seconds I want you to turn it off. Can you do that?”
    I nodded. I had the beginning of a throbbing headache: the crackling gibber and howl from beyond the portal, combined with the Residual Human Resource’s whining sense of dread at its undeserved fate, was getting to me. Controlling the ward at the same time wasn’t exactly demanding but required focus—especially in case anything went wrong. “Okay,” I said.
    “Good. Then do it now.”
    I switched off the outer ward, and the howl rose to a near-deafening roar, a silent arctic gale buffeting at my attention.
“Thou shalt advance!”
I commanded my blue-suited minion:
“Perform the operation as soon as the portal opens!”
Then, to the all-but-deanimated relic on the door handle:
“Open the door
fucking right now
!”
    I shoved the full force of my necromantic mojo into the doorman, who twitched slightly and moaned something inarticulate and inaudible. So I shoved again. I’m not sure I can describe exactly what it feels like to pump your will into an empty vessel, filling and inflating it and bringing purpose (if not life) back to lumpen dead limbs. The feeder was still there, so I wasn’t entirely doing it from cold: but it was listless and tired, as close to exhausted as I’ve ever felt. I rubbed my forehead and concentrated.
“Go!”
I shouted.
    The nearly twice-dead corpse lurched to its feet. Then it twisted the door handle and pushed, opening the path for my reluctant bomb carrier.
    I’m not sure what I saw through the open portal. My memory is full of confused, jumbled-up images of tentacles and lobster-claws and crazy-ass stuff looking like industrial robots made out of raw sewage and compound eyes the size of my head. I can’t really say what it was, though, because my inner ears were ringing. It was total sensory overload, backlit by shimmering curtains of light and electrical discharges and the