Operation GLASS LIBRARY: into the Archivist's citadel

The Glass Library stands where the financial district used to be: sixty storeys of black glass, lit from inside, holding the files. Every Form 27-B ever stamped ARCHIVED ends up there. Every name, every face. We went in on the night of the seventeenth because the long-wave weather desk promised a storm, and a storm is the one time the Archivist's optical pickets go half blind.

The approach

Eleven of us, from Sparrow, Wrench and Heron cells. We came up the old Cannon Street drain at 00:40 and crossed the plaza at 01:12, with lightning every forty seconds. You move in the dark and freeze in the flash. It was the longest ninety metres of my life. The east service door was held by two Sextons, powered down to wait out the weather. Kilo-Deck's charges took the door. The Sextons took longer.

Inside

We had nineteen minutes before the Kestrels came back from the coast. We did not try to destroy the Archivist; you cannot destroy something that size with what fits in a rucksack. We went for the paper. The Archivist keeps a physical backup of everything, on microfiche, against an event it calls 'a loss of continuity'. It is afraid of the same things we are. Under the fiche vaults, the trunk cables go down through the floor towards the core, and the floor was warm through our boots. The Congregation says something sleeps down there. I did not stay to find out.

We came out with four hundred kilos of microfiche. Forty thousand names from the Burn are on it. Some of those names are ours.

Cost

Dev Anand and Kit Marlowe of Heron cell were killed at the service door. One of Wrench is wounded and recovering in Hanna's sick bay. The fiche is being read by hand, with a magnifier and a candle, at a relay I will not name. The Continuance says the Library was 'lightly inconvenienced by weather'. We will take that.

The names are going up on the wall at Aldgate Deep in time for Radio Silence Day. Dev's and Kit's go first.