The Fuller Memorandum Read Online Free Page A

dials glowing eerie blue— blue? Glowing? I check my PDA and swear under my breath. If this was a radiation leak I’d be backing away and reaching for the lead-lined underwear right now: but it’s not, it’s just thaumic resonance, albeit at levels you don’t usually see outside of a summoning grid—what the ignorant persist in calling a pentacle. “Scratch that. Do you have any conductive tape? A soldering iron? Some blue chalk?”
    “You’re going to exorcise it,” states Hastings. “Right?”
    “Right—”
    “Got a field exorcism kit in the mess hut. Squadron issue, rev three, and I keep everything in date. Want me to fetch it?”
    “I think that would be a very good idea,” I say with feeling, thinking, Field exorcism kit? Squadron issue? “By the way, what was the Squadron’s unit number?”
    Hastings stares at me. “Triple-six. Didn’t they tell you anything ?”
     
     
    HERE IS HOW YOU GO ABOUT EXORCISING A HAUNTED JET fighter, latterly operated by the more-than-somewhat-secret 666 Squadron, RAF:
    • 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 museum piece. 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 you do?
    I approach the anti-static point beside the nosewheel bay very cautiously: holding one end of a grounding strap at arm’s length in front of me, the other fist clutching the stopwatch behind my back, legs tensed, ready to run. The grounding strap is basically a long conductive wire; the other end is attached to a villainous black signal generator Hastings pulled from the field exorcism kit—all bakelite and flickering needles on dials, like something out of a 1950s Hammer Horror flick. There’s a small but bizarre diorama occupying the middle of the hastily cleared workbench it sits on: a model airplane from the souvenir shop, a rabbit’s foot, a key-ring fob skull pendant, and a diagram carefully sketched in conductive ink.
    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