The Fuller Memorandum Read Online Free

solid.”
    He took a deep breath. “She should never have been allowed to work on XR727’s cockpit instruments. We had them round the back, under padlock and warded by a class two repulsion geas. She shouldn’t even have been able to see them. She’d have twigged straight off that it wasn’t a normal F.3 integrated flight system and weapons control board. She wasn’t qualified to work on it.”
    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. Clonk . The final domino slides into place.
    “Jesus, Angleton,” I mutter, and pull out my PDA. Tap-click-boing 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