The Apocalypse Codex (Laundry Files, #4)

by Charles Stross

Stuff that really will improve my survival prospects when the tentacles hit the pentacle.”

I’d thank you to stop speculating along such lines. You’re not cleared for them.”

It’s like a reflection of his misplaced childhood, cut off behind the broken mirror of his adult cynicism.

but I want to beard the lion in his den before I get sent up to groom the tiger.

I see Angleton contemplating the situation from a very different perspective, trying to work out how to explain something to someone so impossibly young that the Vietnam War was ancient history before he was born and men haven’t walked on the moon in his lifetime.

in those countries where spooks set policy, it always ends in tears.

His expression is so arch you could hang a suspension bridge from it.

I swear they’re using me as a guinea pig for the scanners for next decade’s airport security theater—

a government-issue scientific officer,

If you have to fight, it means things are already badly out of control.

Religious zeal is not a career asset in British politics;

something about Schiller irritates: a hangnail of the mind.

“Any sufficiently advanced lingerie is indistinguishable from a lethal weapon.”

“There are two types of people in this world,” Pete volunteers helpfully, “those who think there are only two types of people in the world, and everybody else.”

we know the sort of thing that’s likely to happen during CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, and we’re not selfish enough—or evil enough—to condemn a child of ours to die that way.

The immigration goons are courteous but distant—and they’re armed, and a law unto themselves.

And so I enter the United States with a Border Patrol escort—desperate to see me on my way as fast as is humanly possible. What strange times we live in…

There’s a certain point beyond which any sufficiently extreme Calvinist sect becomes semiotically indistinguishable from the Brotherhood of the Black Pharaoh.

But money corrupts. Almost invariably, powers that arise around money are corrupted by it.

The bed is the size of a small aircraft carrier, piled invitingly high with pillows, and pulses in my travel-stressed vision like some kind of carnivorous cotton plant.

I guess I’m not the only one around here who finds jet lag eats away at the social veneer.

Two sentences and Julie began to nod like a metronome; it was amazing how fast most people zoned out if you babbled at them, in Persephone’s experience. (It was all true, easily verifiable—drown ’em in data and they won’t suspect you’re holding out.)

I go downstairs and hit the hotel swimming pool, but after a couple of dozen lengths I’m gasping for breath. Denver air is thin and unsatisfying.

something that claims to be a newspaper.

(Fucking netbooks; you can’t even use one to beat an alien brain parasite to death without it breaking.)

I’m thinking on the fly, here. (Although now that I’m in middle management I think I’m supposed to call it “refactoring the strategic value proposition in real time with agile implementation,” or, if I’m being honest, “making it up as I go along.”)

Mostly they’re harmless, ’long as you’re not a young woman in search of an abortion.”

I can’t tell if it’s an accent or a speech impediment.

The house is dark and chilly as a pub toilet after closing time:

there’s a hammering roar and a series of flashbulb-bright sparks go off at the boundary of the grid as the bullets strike it and go wherever it is that steel-jacketed bullets go when they run into an energized containment field.

the one with the hate on for light sources,

I don’t like people trying to pull mystery-man (or -woman) head-games on me.

a man so wrapped in secrecy that his shadow doesn’t have a high enough security clearance to stick to his heels.

“The boy’s still hamstrung by a residual sense of fair play,

“He has a history of, shall we say, being on the receiving end of abusive management practices. It has taught him to take a skeptical approach to obviously flawed directives.

“Bob is too loyal for his own good. The lad’s got a troublesome conscience.”

(There are many (many (nested)) parentheses: ritual magic, realtime spell-casting, hasn’t been the same since John McCarthy.)

Persephone has constructed a tool that will map the energy gradients around her and sketch yellow contours across the infinite plain, building up a map.

AT&T’s two-wet-shoelaces-and-a-tin-can excuse for wireless broadband has also shat its routing tables and is drooling in a corner.

the very idea of killing a thinking, laughing, loving human being makes me sick in my stomach and fills me with horror.

(You try telling the bereaved survivors that you had to kill their family and friends to protect their freedom.

We make splendid toys for their amusement, until we break.

And he’s inclined to go for the throat when confronted with a fight/flight choice.

“Well…thanks. But I don’t like to make assumptions.” “Well that’s too bad, because you’re running on false ones.”

Bureaucracies excel at performing tasks that must be done consistently whether the people assigned to them are brilliant performers or bumbling fools. You can’t always count on having Albert Einstein in the patent office, so you design its procedures to work even if you hire Mr. Bean by mistake.”

Bureaucracies are inefficient by design. Inefficiency is the twin sister of redundancy, of overcapacity, of the ability to plow through a swamp by brute force alone. If I was embedded within the organization I would spend most of my time in committee meetings, writing reports, and arguing with imbeciles. I would be far less efficient under such constraints, and I am not a patient woman.”

all the way back to Sir Francis Walsingham and John Dee;

Leaving aside the idolatry implicit in taking a mere book as a more authoritative source of truth than divine revelation,

So you end up with divergent sects reading from subtly different versions of the same book—which in turn is a third-generation translation of something which might have been the original codification of an oral tradition—and all convinced that their interpretation overrides such minor obstacles as observable reality.

I can feel Persephone in front of me—feel the outlines of her mind, if that makes sense.