The Rhesus Chart Read Online Free

portal—”
    “Understood,” Angleton said crisply. “Mr. Newstrom. How
exactly
does your grid differ from a standard design?”
    I looked back at the door, but I could see Andy’s expression in my imagination: a naughty boy who has had to get the headmaster out of bed because he’s set fire to the chemistry lab. “It’s not substantially different: I just used an Arduino microcontroller board and a bunch of control code I wrote for it to run a standard ‘hello, spirit world ’ demo—”
    “Did you use an off-the-shelf code library? Or write your own?” Angleton’s interrogation was gentle, precise, and pointed. I could see him in my mind’s eye, too: tall, cadaverously pale, thin as a mummy, with eyes like ice diamonds.
    “I rolled my own code generator in FORTRAN77,” Andy explained. “Atmel AVR machine code, not that high-level Arduino stuff. It seemed more efficient to get down to the bare metal . . .”
    Angleton sighed. And
now
my blood ran cold. Because if there’s one thing worse than an IT manager who’s feeling the chill wind of obsolescence blowing down his neck and consequently trying to contribute code to the repository like an actual working developer, it’s an IT manager who’s getting
creative
. And Andy’s project was nothing if not
creative
, for values of creativity that I don’t want to go anywhere near without body armor and HAZMAT gear. “Mr. Newstrom. We will have words about this later.” Angleton paused: I could feel his eyes on me. “Boy. Tell me what you hear?”
    He always called me
boy
. From anyone else I’d take it badly; from Angleton it was probably a sign of affection.
    “I hear termites,” I said. “About a trillion sixteen-dimensional, elephant-sized termites chewing on the edges of reality.”
    “Did you wire in a remote kill switch?” Angleton asked Andy.
    There was an eloquent moment of silence, punctuated only by the munching of metaphysical mandibles. Then the sound changed.
    “Oh dear,” I said, as Angleton simultaneously said, “Mr. New-strom, evacuate the building. Mr. Howard and I will remain to deal with this.” Then, on the other side of the door, the over-stressed summoning grid ruptured.
    The immediate consequence of the summoning grid rupture wasn’t that spectacular; the door grew colder and the runes engraved in it flared up, glowing the eerie deep blue of Cerenkov radiation. The office was warded to a high level, and would hold for at least half an hour longer than the grid on the card table. But the thing Andy had inadvertently summoned was now forcing its way into our universe directly, no longer confined by the meter-diameter circle on the table. And if it was powerful enough to overload one grid, it might well be able to overpower another, including the structural wards built into the walls, floor, and ceiling of the New Annex: in which case, we could have a real problem on our hands.
    Angleton closed the gap and stepped past me, extending a hand towards the door. He looked at it quizzically, even hesitantly: an expression I’d never seen on his face before, and most unwelcome. Angleton is a DSS, a Detached Special Secretary: in our unofficial lexicon the acronym really stands for Deeply Scary Sorcerer. This is, if anything, an understatement: he’s known to some as the Eater of Souls. That’s because he’s not actually human—he’s an alien intelligence bound into a human body by a powerful necromantic ritual. Luckily for us, he’s on our side. I’m his assistant, apprentice, whatever you call it. I don’t know the real extent of his power, but I’m a moderately competent necromancer in my own right; anything that gives Angleton cause for concern is, by definition, frightening.
    “Boy,” he said conversationally, “this is going to be messy. Please verify that all the human staff are off the premises, then fetch the night watch.”
    “Fetch the—what,
all
of them?”
    “Yes, Bob. We’re going to need zombies.