I lean back and stare up at the slowly roiling smoke-dragons that curl under the fluorescent tubes. It takes me a few seconds to find my voice; my throat is raw, and not from smoke.
"Analysed the situation very fast, the way they train you to: LEAP methodology. Look, evaluate, assign priorities. Fred had grounded the containment field and the level three agency inside it flood-filled him. Level threes aren't sapient but the universe they come from has a much faster timebase than ours; as soon as he crossed the containment they mapped his nervous system and cracked it like a rotten walnut. Full possession in two to five hundred milliseconds."
"But what did you do?" Andy pushes at me.
I swallow. "Well, I was opposite him, and he'd grounded the containment. At that point neither the attractor or the antinode were up and running, so we were all targets. The obvious priority was to shut down the possession, fast. You do that by physically disabling the possessed before the agency can construct a defence in depth. I'd been worried by the electrics and made sure I knew where the fire extinguisher was, so that was what I grabbed first."
Boris: "It was the first thing that come to hand?"
"Yes."
Andy nods. "There's going to be a Board of Enquiry," he says. "But that's basically what we needed to know. It fits with what we're hearing from the other witnesses."
"How badly was he hurt?"
Andy looks away. My hands are shaking so much that my coffee cup rattles against its saucer. "He's dead, Bob. He was dead the moment he crossed the line. You and everybody else there would be dead, too, if you hadn't punched his ticket. You've got one colleague who wasn't there, two who didn't notice what was going on, and five-including the instructor-who swear blind that you saved their lives." He looks back at me: "But we have to put you through the enquiry process all the same because it was a fatal incident. He was married with two kids, and there's a pension and other residuals to sort out."
"I didn't know." I stop, before I say something silly. Fred was a jerk, but no man is an island. I feel sick, thinking about the consequences of what happened in that room. Maybe if I'd explained things to him during the break, patted him on the back and sent him away to find a course that would use up his departmental training credits harmlessly-
Andy cuts into my introspection: "Oh, it's a real mess, all right. Always is, when something goes pear-shaped in the line of duty. I'll go so far as to say I expect the enquiry to be a formality in this case-you'll probably come out of it with a commendation. But in the meantime, I'm afraid you're going back to your office where Harriet will formally notify you that you're suspended on full pay pending an enquiry and possible disciplinary action. You're going to go home and cool your heels until next week, then we'll try to get it over with as fast as possible." He leans back from his desk and sighs. "This sucks, really and truly, but there's no getting around it. So I suggest you treat the suspension as time to chill out and get your head together, get over things-because after the enquiry I expect we'll be resurrecting your application for active duty training and field ops, and looking at it favourably."
"Huh?" I sit up.
"Ninety percent of active duty consists of desk work. You can do that, even if the hat doesn't fit too well. Another 9 percent is sitting around in bushes while the rain drips down your collar, wondering what the hell you're doing there. I figure you can do that, too. It's the other 1 percent-a few seconds of confused danger-that's hard to get right, and I think you've just demonstrated the capability. To the extent that it's my call, you've got it"-he stands up-"if you want it."
I stand up too. "I'll think about it," I say, and I walk out the door before I start mouthing obscenities, because I can't get Fred's expression out of my head. I've never seen someone die before. Funny, isn't it? Most of us go through life and never really see someone die, much less die violently. I should be on a high, knowing that I'm going to qualify for field ops, and if this interview had happened yesterday I would be. But now I just want to throw up in a corner.
BRAINS IS IN THE KITCHEN WHEN I GET HOME, ATTEMPTING to cook an omelette without breaking the eggshell.
It's raining, and my jacket is drenched from the short run between the tube station and the front door; give thanks once more to the invisible boon of contact lenses, without which I would be staring at the world through streak-befuddled spectacles. "Hi," says Brains. "Can you hold this for me?"
He hands me an egg. I stare.
The normally not-so-clean kitchen worktop is gleaming and sterile, as if in preparation for a particularly fussy surgeon. At one side of it sits a syringe and needle preloaded with a grey, opaque liquid-essence of concrete. At the other side of it sits a food processor, its safety shutoff hacked and something that looks worryingly like half an electric motor bolted to the drive shaft that normally turns its blades. I stand there dripping and staring: even for Brains's projects, this is distinctly abnormal.
I hand the egg back. "I'm not in the mood."
"C'mon. Just hold it?"
"I mean it. I've just been suspended, pending an enquiry." I unzip my jacket and let it tumble to the floor. "Game over, priority interrupt, segmentation fault."
Brains cocks his head toward one side and stares at me with big bright eyes, like a slightly demented owl. "Seriously?"
"Yeah." I hunt around for the coffee jar and begin ladling scoopfuls into the cafetière. "Water in the kettle?"
"Suspended? On pay? Why?"
In goes the coffee. "Yes, on pay. I saved six people's lives, plus my own. But I lost the seventh, so there's going to be an enquiry. They say it's a formality, but-" Click, the kettle is now on, heating up to a steam explosion.
"Something to do with that training course?"
"Yeah. Fred from Accounting. He grounded a summoning grid-"
"Gene police! You! Out of the pool, now!"
"It's not funny."
He looks at me again and loses his levity. "No, Bob, it's not funny. I'm sorry." He offers me the egg. "Here, hold this, I implore you."
I take it and nearly drop it; it's hot, and feels slightly greasy. There's also a faint stench of brimstone. "What the hell-"
"Just for a moment, I promise you." He pulls out a roughly made copper coil, the wire wrapped around a plastic pie cutter and hooked up to some gadget or other, and gingerly threads it over the egg, around my wrist and back again. "There. The egg should now be degaussed." He puts the coil down and takes the egg from my nerveless hand. "Observe! The first prototype of the ultimate integral ovine omelette." He cracks it on the side of the worktop and a yellow, leathery curdled sponge flops out. The smell of brimstone is now pronounced, tickling at my nostrils like the aftereffect of a fireworks show. "It's still at the development stage-I had to use a syringe on it, but next on the checklist is gel-diffusion electrophoresis using flocculated hemoglobin agglutinates pending in-ovo polymerisation of the rotor elements-so how did your pet luser autodarwinate?"
I pull up a trash can and sit down. Maybe Brains isn't as monumentally self-obsessed as he looks? At least he slipped the question in painlessly enough.
"You know how there's always someone who ends up in the wrong course? It was that dumb accounts clerk I'm always bitching about. He got in the Intro to Occult Computing course by mistake. I shouldn't have been there, anyway, but Harriet managed to convince Andy I needed it; getting her own back for last month, I think." Harriet has been having problems with her email system and asked my advice; I don't know quite what went wrong, but she ended up blowing five days of the departmental training budget attending a course on sendmail configuration. Took her three weeks to stop twitching every time somebody mentioned rules. "Well and all, I guess what he did qualifies as a massive self-LART, but…"