The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross [169]
At the foot of the wide, glittering staircase in the middle of the fourth floor I temporarily lose Grondor. It might have something to do with the tenth-level mage lurking behind the transom with a magic flamethrower, or the simultaneous arrival of about a ton of steel spikes falling from concealed ceiling panels, but Grondor is reduced to a greasy pile of goo on the floor. I sigh and do something to the mage that would be extremely painful if he were a real person. “Is she upstairs?” I ask the glowing letters.
SUR3 TH1NG D00D!!!
“Any more traps?”
N0!!??!
“Cool.” I step over the grease spot and pause just in front of the staircase. It never pays to be rash. I pick up a stray steel spike and chuck it on the first step and it goes BANG with extreme prejudice. “Not so cool.” Rinse, cycle, repeat, and four small explosions later I’m standing in front of the doorway facing the top step. No more whoopee cushions, just a twentieth-level sorceress and a minion in chains. Happy joy. “Pinky. Plan B. Get it ready to run, on my word.”
I break through the door and enter the witch’s lair.
Once you’ve seen one witch’s den you’ve seen ’em all. This one is a bit glitzier than usual, and some of the furniture is nonstandard even taking into account the Laundry hack packs linked into this realm. Where did she get the mainframe from? I wonder briefly before considering the extremely ominous Dho-Na geometry curve in the middle of the floor (complete with a frantic-looking Pete chained down in the middle of it) and the extremely irate-looking sorceress beyond.
“Emma MacDougal, I presume?”
She turns my way, spitting blood. “If it wasn’t for you meddling hackers, I’d have gotten away with it!” Oops, she’s raising her magic wand.
“Gotten away with what?” I ask politely. “Don’t you want to explain your fiendish plan, as is customary, before totally obliterating your victims? I mean, that’s a Dho-Na curve there, so you’re obviously planning a summoning, and this server is inside Ops block. Were you planning some sort of low-key downsizing?”
She snorts. “You stupid Ops heads, why do you always assume it’s about you?”
“Because—” I shrug. “We’re running on a server in Ops. What do you think happens if you open a gateway for an ancient evil to infest our departmental LAN?”
“Don’t be naïve. All that’s going to happen is Pimple-Features here is going to pick up a good, little, gibbering infestation then go spread it to Mama. Which will open up the promotion ladder once again.” She stares at me, then her eyes narrow thoughtfully. “How did you figure out it was me?”
“You should have used a smaller mainframe emulator, you know; we’re so starved for resources that Bosch runs on a three-year-old Dell laptop. If you weren’t slurping up all our CPU resources, we probably wouldn’t have noticed anything was wrong until it was too late. It had to be someone in HR, and you’re the only player on the radar. Mind you, putting poor Peter-Fred in a position of irresistible temptation was a good move. How did you open the tunnel into our side of the network?”
“He took his laptop home at night. Have you swept it for spyware today?” Her grin turns triumphant. “I think it’s time you joined Pete on the summoning-grid sacrifice node.”
“Plan B!” I announce brightly, then run up the wall and across the ceiling until I’m above Pete.
P1AN 8 :) :) :)
The room below my head lurches disturbingly as Pinky rearranges the furniture. It’s just a ninety-degree rotation, and Pete’s still in the summoning grid, but now he’s in the target node instead of the sacrifice zone. Emma is incanting; her wand tracks me, its tip glowing green. “Do it, Pinky!