PHONE CALLS, EMAILS, AND PAPERWORK ENSUE. THE OCCULUS team is told to stand down, the ops room are sheepishly informed that there’s nothing to see here, the Code Blue is cancelled, and I get a huge black mark for budget overspend on my departmental project matrix. There’s even a post-mortem meeting scheduled for the day after tomorrow, to rub it in: INCIDENT 2911.1-A CODE BLUE/MISIDENTIFICATION WALK-THROUGH pops up in my calendar.

The thing is, it is technically a misfire; very nearly a blue-on-blue incident. Mhari and her charismatically intense boss Oscar assure me that there is no ongoing campaign of exsanguination and hemophagia by the Scrum. Everything is copacetic with HR regarding their induction as the Laundry’s newest and most sparkly high-end formal logic brains trust. Even though her little playmates have developed super-strength and a disturbing tendency to burst into flames if they go outdoors in daylight, who am I to shout “vampire!” in a crowded graveyard?

Fuck it, she always was better than me at administrative/managerial maneuvering. As witness her success in leveraging the fallout from our out-falling to get herself semi-permanently out-placed to a company where she probably earns more in a month than I take home in a year.

I am certainly not stupid enough to insist on blowing the whistle on her little white lie about the V-word when a fang fucker—okay, a temporarily photophobic math PhD with the strength of a rabid grizzly bear—is resting his hands on my shoulder as I countersign the necessary paperwork to certify that said fang fucker is One Of Our People. For whatever value of “people” you choose to use. (In any case, in the Laundry we tend to take a rather looser definition of the word than is the norm elsewhere.)

Here’s the situation, as I understand it at this point: