Glasshouse - Charles Stross [92]
I shake my head and put the box file back. From the level of dust on top of it, it hasn’t been touched for quite a time. I don’t know what this stuff is, but it isn’t what Fiore and Yourdon came here to look at. Which leaves the trapdoor.
I bend down and grab the brass ring, then lift. The wooden slab hinges up at the back, and I see a flight of steps leading down. They’re carpeted, and there are wooden handrails to either side. Okay, so there’s a secret basement under the library, I tell myself, trying not to giggle with fear. What have I been working on top of?
Of course I go downstairs. After what Fiore did to Phil and Esther, I’m probably dead if they find me in the repository. Taking the next step is a logical progression, nothing more.
The steps go down into twilight, but they don’t go down very far. The floor is three meters below the trapdoor, and there’s a light switch on the rail at the bottom. I flick it and glance around.
Guess what? I’m not in the dark ages anymore.
If I was still in the dark ages, this would be a musty basement with brick walls and wooden lath ceiling, or maybe poured concrete and steel beams. They weren’t big on structural diamond back then, and their floors didn’t grow zebrastripe fur, and they used short-lived electrical bulbs instead of surfacing their ceilings with fluorescent paint. There’s a very retro-looking lounger in a mode that I’m sure went out of fashion some time between the end of the Oort colonial era and the first of the conservationista republics, and some weird black-resin chairs that look like the skeletons of insects, if insects grew four meters tall and supported themselves with endoskeletons. Hmm. I glance over my shoulder. Yes, if Yourdon and Fiore were having a knockdown shouting match in here with the hatch open, I might just about have heard it at the front desk.
The other items in the basement are a lot more disconcerting.
For starters, there’s something that I am almost certain is a full military A-gate. It’s a stubby cylinder about two meters high and two meters in diameter, its shell slick with the white opacity of carbonitrile armor. There’s a ruggedized control workstation next to it, perched on a rough wooden plinth—you use those things in the field when you’re operating under emission control, to make field expedient whatever it is you need in order to save your ass. Got plutonium? Got nuke. Not that I’ve got the authentication ackles to switch the thing on—if I mess with it I’ll probably set off about a billion alarms—but its presence here is as incongruous as a biplane in the bronze age.
For seconds, the walls are lined with racks of shelving bearing various pieces of equipment. There’s what I’m fairly certain is a generator pack for a Vorpal sword, like the one on the Church altar. That brings back unpleasant memories, because I remember those swords and what you can do with them—blood fountaining out into a room where the headless corpses are already stacked like cordwood beside the evacuation gate—and it makes me feel nauseous. I take a quick breath, then I look at the shelves on the other side of the room. There are lots of them, some of them stacked with the quaint rectangular bricks of high-density storage, but most of the space is given over to ring binders full of paper. This time, instead of serial numbers on the spines, there are old-fashioned human-readable titles, although they don’t mean much to me. Like Revised Zimbardo Study Protocol 4.0, and Church Scale Moral Delta Coefficients, and Extended Host Selection Criteria—
Host selection criteria? I pull that one off the shelf and begin reading. An indeterminate time later I shake myself and put it back. I feel dirty, somehow contaminated. I really wish I didn’t understand what it said, but I’m afraid I do, and now I’m going to have to figure out what to do with the knowledge.
I stare at the A-gate,