“Did HR say anything about continuity of support for OPERA CAPE personnel?” Mo asks, then freezes as she registers Mhari’s expression. “Oh dear.”
“I might be spooking at nothing. For all I know provisions are already in place.” Mhari glances towards the shuttered window. “But I haven’t been told, and this isn’t just a personal crisis. If they haven’t made provision for Janice or Dick or John, that’s bad enough. But what about Alex and the Host’s magi? What are they feeding them?”
“Alex can keep All-Highest in line, and All-Highest can—” Mo stops dead as her brain catches up with her mouth. The situation in the camp on Dartmoor is delicate. Three thousand surrendered alf?r warriors and their servants and dependents sitting in a barbed-wire circle surrounded by tanks are one thing—especially once they’ve been disarmed and bound by geas not to fight back—but alf?r magi are PHANGs by any other name, and far less tractable. The alf?r traditionally controlled them by a combination of castration and religious indoctrination, but Mo can’t begin to guess what will happen when the blood thirst rises and threatens to overwhelm them. The problem with feeding PHANGs is that the blood needs to come from a live donor, and the V-parasites use it as a bridge to the victim’s brain, which they rapidly chew into the lacy wreckage associated with death through V syndrome dementia. The Laundry arranged for a hospice to supply their half-dozen PHANG employees with blood from terminally ill patients whose lives won’t be substantially shortened, but the alf?r magi are used to a rich diet of healthy brains. “What have they been doing?”
Mhari’s cheek twitches. “When the Host surrendered, there were a number of slaves who had already been tapped, but not used up. That was three weeks ago, and they’re already almost gone. According to the last memo I saw the crisis was going to become acute by the end of this week.”
“Do you have any suggestions?” Mo asks tonelessly.
“Do I…?” Mhari’s eyes glow red for an instant before she forces herself to sit back. She laughs shakily as her irises fade back to their pale turquoise baseline. “Nothing good. Cycling PHANGs into storage in a time-frozen containment grid would work, but you’re not going to get many volunteers; all it takes is one bigot with a grudge and a flashgun and that’s it. It’d be like being handed a life sentence in solitary confinement with no fixed duration, only worse. Even John has something he calls a life—parents, a room he rents, that kind of thing. But there’s worse. Alex.
“He’s out there in the camp keeping Cassie under control, and she’s out there in the camp holding down the Host, and as long as he was a sworn member of Q-Division that was fine because he was an agent of the government and there was a clear line of authority back to the Crown. But if they’ve absentmindedly fired him along with the rest of us—”
“Oh fuck.”
“You said it.” Mhari stands wearily. “It’s like what happened in Iraq after the invasion, when the American occupation government fired the entire army and the police without bothering to disarm them or asking what they’d do.”
Mo surprises herself by standing and, as Mhari pushes herself up, preparing to leave, she hugs her. “You take care,” she says, looking Mhari in the eye. “I mean that.”
Mhari blinks, then leans into Mo’s embrace. “You too,” she murmurs. “I’ve got a feeling this is going to be a bumpy ride.”
“I’ll have a word with Dr. Armstrong. We’ll sort something out.”
“Good luck with that.” Mhari pulls back, then takes a deep breath. “I’m out of here. See you tonight.” And she walks away with her back straight and proud, leaving Mo alone in the darkened office with the dreadful apprehension that more things are broken than meet the eye.
*
At sites scattered all around the UK, hundreds of projects are coming to an abrupt, disastrous end.
In Grantham, behind a cast-iron door in a high brick wall warded so that it appears derelict to casual observers, a very peculiar institution receives letters printed on paper informing the staff that their funding is being terminated. Two doctors and a (human) nurse exchange heated expressions of disbelief with an equally worried office administrator. Meanwhile, in the secure ward below, the four elderly inmates are happily unaware that orders requesting their transfer to beds in a boringly insecure NHS psychiatric hospital are being dealt with and that on the morrow an ambulance will arrive to rip them away from St. Hilda’s, their home and the site of their life’s work for the past fifty years.
(They are not in fact insane, but merely disconnected from the mundanity of consensus reality, and by the time the staff at their new home begin to realize that they are dealing not with institutionalized basket cases but with deeply scary [and dissociated] sorcerers who are now extremely irritated, it will be too late.)
The lost village of Dunwich, down on the east coast, receives a postal delivery twice a week by warded boat. The boat crew have been laid off, and it will be some time before the staff and trainees in the school realize that anything is wrong, as the commissary runs out of fresh milk, the diesel generator runs low, and the bar runs perilously low on cask-conditioned beer. (But that’s probably the least serious of the shutdowns.)
Around London, in the windowless factorylike sheds that contain the Laundry’s server farms, the racks of equipment that monitor the nation’s occult defenses begin to shut down. The staff have been ordered to leave, and the electricity bills will go unpaid. In the early hours of Tuesday morning, a fire in a substation—nothing to do with the Laundry per se—causes a local brownout and trips the backup electric system in data center TANGENT ORANGE. Unnoticed and with no drama, the site switches to internal power and the diesel backup generator kicks into life. But the tanker hasn’t been called, the fuel level is perilously low, and nobody is watching, so on Tuesday afternoon the eight thousand rackmount servers that provide SCORPION STARE coverage for London and the southwest will power down hard.