The Rhesus Chart Read Online Free Page B

wouldn’t willingly approach.
    “Sssss,”
said one of the night watchmen, reaching for the doorknob. I could feel the taste of its mind, half-afraid and half-eager to discover whatever waited behind the door, ready to
eat
—
    It touched the doorknob. And pushed.
    The door swung open to reveal a luminous chaos. Green-edged shadows flickered across the room, dazzling me, as the other zombie lurched forward, straight into the embrace of a tangled skein of many-jointed limbs and a hairball of writhing tentacles, some of them sprouting fern-like leaves that quested blindly around the edges of the door. One of them sprouted, extending swiftly into the room; it reached the edge of the inner grid and sizzled, recoiling violently. The mass of wildly waving intrusive appendages spasmed and twitched, pulling back—with the zombie dangling in its grasp, unmoving. “Close the door!” called Angleton, and the other zombie pulled, hard. The door scraped shut, the warding on it sucking it back into place in its frame.
    “Well, that didn’t go so well,” he remarked conversationally, pulling a starched white cotton handkerchief from his breast pocket. He wiped his forehead: the cloth came away pink, smeared with perspiration and blood. Angleton glanced at the kerchief disapprovingly, then folded it neatly and tucked it away. Then he looked at me. “The natives are restless tonight.” A mirthless smile. “A capital learning opportunity don’t you think, boy? Quick. Tell me what you saw.”
    “I—” I swallowed.
You have got to be shitting me.
This was Angleton all over. What you or I would recognize as an alien invasion by tentacled horrors from beyond spacetime Angleton would see as a teachable moment. I could swear there was liquid helium running in his veins. “Morphologically diverse subsentient entity, didn’t even notice it was in physical contact with a vessel for the feeders in the night; the usual death patterning didn’t touch it.” (One of the reasons the night watch are so dreadful—to most people—is that skin-to-skin contact with one of them is usually about as survivable as skin-to-metal contact with an electric chair. Angleton is made of sterner stuff, and I’m immune to them for a different reason. But even so.) “What next?”
    The mirthless smile broadened. “You send in another body and watch what happens, while I see what I can find out about the world on the other side of that door.”
    I turned to the group of Residual Human Resources in the corner. They looked singularly unenthusiastic for the fate Angleton had in mind for them, even by zombie standards. “You can’t just go using the night watch as meat probes!” A residual budget-focussed reflex prompted me to protest. “There’ll be hell to pay in the morning! Security will have a cow!”
    “Security will have a much bigger problem to deal with if we can’t close down this portal by then, boy.” Angleton glanced at Andy’s office. The remaining zombie in the outer ward was still clutching the door handle. After a moment I realized it was frozen to it. “Do you have any suggestions?”
    “We don’t have any spare nukes on the premises, do we?”
Don’t be silly, Bob,
I told myself. “Well, hmm. It depends if what is on the other side of the door is still Andy’s office, with a portal inside it, or if the grid’s ripped wide open and the door is actually opening into another domain.”
    “The latter, I believe.” Angleton cocked his head on one side. “You are considering the question of damage containment?”
    “Yeah.” I scratched my head, then pulled my hand back when I felt my hair dripping with sweat. “Send a bomb through, kill or injure whatever is pushing through from the other side, use the opportunity to exorcise everything on the other side of the door—”
    “I have a better solution than exorcism,” Angleton stated. “Your camera, boy. Have you loaded the basilisk firmware?”
    “Um, let me check.” My