The Annihilation Score (Laundry Files)

by Charles Stross

  “Thank you for a wonderful evening,” I tell him with heartfelt gratitude as I pull my shoes on.

  “No, thank you.” He pauses. “I was not expecting this turn of events. I mean it.” He sounds slightly shaky. “I’m touched.”

  “Well,” I say awkwardly. We kiss again. “I need to get my head around it, Jim. It’s been a wonderful evening but I don’t know if it will still be wonderful if we go too fast —”

  “Well then, we shouldn’t do that,” he says, as level-headed as I could hope for. “Talk tomorrow?”

  “Definitely,” I say, then before I’m tempted to change my mind and invite him in I climb out of the car and walk to my house alone. Part of me is kicking myself for not throwing caution to the winds, but I’ve got a lot of questions to answer before our next date, up to and including whether I want to try and salvage my marriage first. And something tells me I won’t have very long to think about it.

  I go upstairs and shed my glamorous mirror-world skin, then crawl into bed alone – except for Spooky, who parks herself precariously on the footboard and stares at me with huge dark eyes. Bloody cat, trying to psych me out.

  I fall asleep and dream, of course. And it should come as no surprise at all that it’s a classic anxiety dream, bubbling up from my conflicted lonely subconscious. I dream that I’m walking through the darkened streets of London, some time in the early hours of the morning. It’s cool and it’s been raining recently and a chill wind raises gooseflesh on my bare skin – naked because this is the classic anxiety dream, the one where you’re in the nude and everyone else is wearing clothes.

  A voice I know only I can hear is calling me, telling me to catch the tube: if I don’t, I’ll be late home, late reaching safety and security. (Which is silly because the tube shuts down at 1 a.m. and the traction power stays off until the first trains start running again shortly before 6 a.m., but dreams don’t have to make logical sense.)

  So I scuttle between darkened doorways, avoiding masses of wind-strewn litter and the odd sleeping homeless person: heart-in-mouth I cross Whetstone Park, tiptoe up Gate Street in the dark. Two police officers on foot patrol walk past on the opposite side, certain to see the naked woman crouched in the doorway – but they look right past me and keep on going. In this dream I am naked but I have the middle-aged woman’s unwanted superpower of social invisibility. What kind of sense does that make? Dream logic.

  This is definitely a dream, because in real life you would not catch me walking the streets naked after dark. Nor would I carefully descend the dozen or so steps to the gates of a locked tube station. I slip through the barrier, then chain the gate shut behind me. The escalators are stilled for the night: their metal steps are sharp and cold under my feet as I descend in near darkness. I’ve got a feeling, an urge, that the compass in my skull is telling me to proceed to a familiar platform. Platform Five. Aldwych branch, the other nagging strand of my unsolved-cases anxiety. I walk along the short platform until I come to the end. The signals are set to red and the track power turned off, but I still shudder. Something scuttles and moves in the tunnel entrance: tube mice.

  I cross the warning barrier at the end of the platform and climb down onto the track bed. My feet ache continuously now, for I’ve been abusing them constantly for hours – shiny new heels, then barefoot on the street. I walk into the tunnel.

  ***Help.*** It’s the still, small voice of my demon lover, my muse, my curse, my destiny, floating in the darkness in front of me. It’s Lecter: abducted and abused, held hostage by strange powers that want to tie him to a new bearer.

  I stumble and shuffle along through the darkened tunnel for an infinitely long time. Track ballast scratches at my feet; when I slip, I catch myself on the cold, rough brick and cast-iron lining of the wall. I walk past rows of arched recesses, survival trenches for tube workers. In my dream they serve as niches in an ossuary, each one filled by the on-end coffin of a plague pit burial, open to reveal their occupant’s final deathly grimace. Heavy cables snake alongside at ankle level, secured to racks bolted to the walls. Anxiety dream redux: my subconscious couldn’t frighten me with naked-on-the-streets-of-London, so it’s iterated through loss-anxiety to a healthy dose of siderodromophobia.

  ***Beware.***

  For some time now the tunnel has been descending and curving to the right. It’s dark as a night with the new moon riding low, only the odd emergency light and signal showing me the way forward – the relatively bright platform is lost in the distance behind me. But I have walked past a points signal repeater, and can just make out something irregular and metallic at ground level. I touch the wall. It feels different, smoother. I run my finger along it, walking slowly forward until it roughens again perhaps ten meters further along the tunnel.

  ***Back up,*** says the voice in my head.

  I back up obediently, and then I trip over something hard and cold at ankle level. I catch myself as I tumble, and then I am no longer walking along a tube tunnel. This is a wider corridor, with a wooden floor and scuffed tan-painted walls, doors opening off to either side. It’s clearly backstage at a theater or performing venue of some kind: it curves, and —

  I am in one of the side rooms. It’s an instrument store, with stands and piles of cases full of orchestral equipment – the instruments that don’t usually go home with their owners. Here a row of kettle drums, there a wooden cabinet full of tambourines, triangles, and other minor items.

  ***Over here!*** calls the quiet voice, and behind a row of stacked wooden chairs I find a familiar battered white violin case. My heart pounds as I reach out and take it, and then I am clutching his case in front of me (as if it’s adequate concealment!) while I shiver on a floodlit stage in front of a full house, a very familiar house. It’s the Royal Albert Hall, and I’m on stage wearing only my gooseflesh-raised skin, and every seat is full, the audience staring at me accusingly. Their faces are pale, indistinguishable blobs that seem to hover in the twilight, somewhere between the collars of their uniform shirts and the brims of their custody helmets.

  ***If the lead violin would care to take her seat?*** The conductor is gently sarcastic as he chides me in Lecter’s borrowed tones. There is a throne – no other word is fit to describe it – at the center of the stage, below the organ, where the soloist would normally stand. This being Lecter’s dream I might have expected monstrous charnel furniture assembled from interlocking bones: but as I shuffle backwards towards it (violin case still clutched defensively between my body and the silently staring disapproval of the audience of faceless officers), I realize it is made of thousands of stacked police notebooks. ***We are waiting for the lead violin,*** the conductor explains to the audience.

  I am nearly at the throne of evidence when I realize that the violin is no longer in his case: I’m carrying him in one hand and the bow in the other, and there’s something wrong. A body in blue steps forward, shadows skeletally grinning under his helmet as with bony hands he positions a manuscript on the monstrous music stand that sits before the violin soloist’s throne. I know that score: I’ve performed it a dozen times in my dreams over the weeks since the British Library robbery.

  I see the conductor’s face for the first time: or rather, I don’t, because I recognize him from his absence, and he’s in the high security lock-up at Belgravia where we put him after the takedown on Downing Street, isn’t he?

  “You can’t make me do it!” I shout as I throw Lecter’s bow at the Mandate.

  Lights snap on overhead, a concussive blast of photons that scorch the back of my eyelids. I cower and cover my face with one arm. Figures step forward out of the photorhodopsin-stained backdrop: two in front, two closing in behind me. Daft Punk Territorial Support Group Judge Dredd Empty Uniforms – the uniforms Ramona had designed for my people – close in around me, raising power-assisted gloves that contain no human fingers. The Naked Woman versus the Empty Suits.

  “You’re nicked!” The uniforms chant in unison as they grab me and twist m
y arms painfully behind my back. I can’t breathe. They ratchet a pair of handcuffs closed around my wrists, zip-lock my ankles together, drop a bag over my head, and lift me to shoulder level. I’m suffocating as I open my mouth to scream: but there is no air here, just a tongueful of warm fur.

  With an angry chirrup, Spooky plants a surprisingly cold pad on my cheek and stands up, flexing her claws. I realize I’m lying alone between damp, chilly sheets, breathless and heart pounding in the wake of a suffocation nightmare. I resolve never to complain about Spooky sleeping on my face again, then I get out of bed and go downstairs to check the wards on Lecter’s safe.

  Because you can never be too careful.

  Sunday is as Sunday does: I spend it prosaically, catching up on housework chores and trying not to ask myself whether what I feel for Jim has the potential to turn serious. This is, of course, like trying not to think about green elephants: once you start consciously trying to avoid it, it becomes impossible. So I pop a sleeping pill at bedtime, and it is a distinct relief when Monday morning rolls around and I can dive back into a distracting office.

  The first thing I do when I get to my room is to park Lecter in the securely warded safe. Then I fire off an email to Dr. Armstrong, asking if he has a spare hour. To my surprise, he gets back to me right away: this lunchtime is available. So that corner of my diary is penciled in for a chat about these dreams I’ve been having – and by extension, about Lecter – and other, more worrying things.

  Last week I decreed that from today we’d be starting up regular Monday morning management meetings, just to keep all department heads in the loop. The Unit – with an effort I remind myself that we’re now officially a Force – is big enough that we have to crawl out of the Precambrian jellyfish swamp of bottom-up organizational structure and grow a management backbone. I don’t know everything that’s going on anymore, and although I know all the names and faces of the people working under me, there’s no way I can stay in touch with what they do. Ergo, delegation, and the bane of management that ensues: endless meetings.

  For now the meeting team consists of Ramona, Mhari, Jim, and myself: so we hold it in my office over coffee and it’s blessedly short. It’s going to change soon enough, though – I can see the writing on the wall.

  I get my first surprise of the day when I ask, “Do we have any other business?”

  Jim nods: “Yes, I got a memo via the Home Office. It’s about the inaccessible tube station – BTP got a resolution, it turns out there’s some other agency involved. Aldwych has been shut for years anyway, and apparently TfL agreed to transfer it to this other agency on a five-year lease without telling anyone, including the on-site guards.” His cheek twitches.

  “That’s —” Mhari shakes her head.

  “Crazy?” I ask. “Do you know who the agency in question is?”

  Jim’s frown deepens. “As it happens, I do.” He glances at Ramona, then Mhari, then back at me. “Promise this won’t go any further?”

  “Promise —” I stop dead just as Ramona nods slowly.

  “I think I see where this is going,” she says tonelessly.

  Mhari’s eyes narrow. “Spill it,” she tells Jim.

  Jim nods, very slightly, then glances at me. “I’ll thank you for not spreading this any further,” he tells us, “but you know full well that most police officers have not been briefed about the existence and true purpose of the organization you people really belong to.”

  The Laundry’s true purpose? I shrug. “Yes, but —” I stop. “You’re not telling me —” I begin.

  “It’s the Specialist Crime and Operations Department.” He clears his throat, a worry frown forming at the corners of his lips, his eyes. “Very few of them – almost none of them – are cleared for Laundry-related material. And someone up top, high enough to have tons of clout but nevertheless not on the briefing list, decided that in view of the rising tide of supervandalism it would be a good idea to have a deep bunker for incident command and containment of dangerous individuals. I mean, you saw how small and under-equipped the cells at Belgravia nick are?”

  I nod. “Carry on.”

  “It came from the top down a while ago, and I didn’t get the memo because I was on secondment: it was while we were on that fisheries jaunt. Aldwych is being rented until the CrossRail TBMs can be redeployed to build us a proper facility – if we get the budget for it, of course. So the first element of the rebuild was to shut off street-level access. Once construction has finished, they’ll partly reopen the stairwell, but as an oubliette so that villains can be sent down but can’t get back up. They’re going to run it like an ICBM silo, with watch crews on duty and underground access only via special trains.” He looks disapproving. “The next Criminal Justice Act will make changes to our ability to detain suspects for questioning without charge just to make this work.”

  “Well, that’s —” I hesitate to say nice.

  “How good of them to keep us fully informed!” Ramona chirps pointedly. Jim avoids her gaze.

  I roll my eyes. “People, please let’s try not to get into the habit of saying what we think all the time?” Ramona is actually right: the Met setting up a secure supervillain nick without telling us stinks like a month-old fish. It reeks of maneuvering under false colors. Someone in the executive suite is trying to cut us out of the action on our own turf. What else might they be hiding from us? But it’s impolitic to say that sort of thing aloud, especially on the record.

  “I’m very sorry.” Jim finishes his coffee. “But it’s strictly hands-off. There’s some kind of pissing match going on in the executive suite at the Yard – at a guess they’ve got a couple of Deputy Commissioners squabbling for who gets to run the new specialist command. You don’t get to that level without being a political officer, if you follow my drift. Doubtless they’ll end up making a bid for our unit in due course.” He sounds disgusted. “Save me from empire builders.” He pauses. “It’s probably worth my skin if word gets out that I told you this.”

  “Well, that’s just peachy,” I manage. “Don’t worry, your secret is safe with us, Officer Friendly. So, um, do we have anything else to talk about this morning?”

  It turns out that there is nothing else to discuss, which is probably a good thing. They say if you start each day by swallowing a live toad nothing can possibly make it worse, but after that piece of news I’m not so sure.

  And then my day really begins to turn to shit.

  I’m shutting down my laptop to go and do lunch with the Senior Auditor when I get a voice call from Alison in HR. “Dr. O’Brien?” She sounds worried.

  “Hi! You caught me on the way out of the office. Is there anything I can —” I do a double take and nearly facepalm. “Is this about Jim Grey?”

  “Yes, yes it is.”

  I’m on edge immediately because there’s a brief pause between her words that doesn’t feel right. “What’s the problem?”

  “Well, you asked me to look into his medical background and the details of his armor, and, um, it puts me in a sticky position. I’m afraid I can’t help you. I mean, I can’t. Medical files are legally privileged information. But you mentioned his armor? I can confirm that it’s definitely unpowered. If you’ve seen him walking through walls in it, that’s entirely due to his own powers. It’s also tailored closely to fit. I am allowed to say that he first manifested superhuman abilities nearly fourteen months ago. Um. Doctor? I know this isn’t my field, but if he isn’t being screened for K syndrome on an ongoing basis, he could be heading for big medical trouble.”

  I put the phone down with an oh-shit sensation in the pit of my stomach: not just the usual headache of sending one of my staff for a bunch of tiresome medical tests and juggling rotas to cover for him, but a nauseous sense of dread. Good news: Jim’s armor isn’t haunted. If I see Officer Friendly flying around, then he’s Jim, which means he isn’t holding out on me – isn’t a sock puppet for Freudstein. Bad news, though: Jim’s vulnerable, just like any oth
er occult practitioner. And something in me balks at the idea of exposing him to threats that force him to use his powers in ways that make his gray matter a tempting tidbit for the feeders. But that’s the sort of threat I’m supposed to expose him to, daily, as part of our job! It hasn’t been a problem with Bob, for ages – his entanglement with the Eater of Souls protects him, just as Lecter insulates me from their attentions. But Jim is vulnerable, and I can’t be detached about it anymore: I’ve fallen into a conflict of interest.

  So I’m feeling particularly fragile as I catch the tube across London, feeling naked again in the absence of my instrument. Being out and about on business without a violin case slung over my shoulder simply feels wrong. Try to imagine James Bond without a gun or a Martini in sight: It’s incongruous, isn’t it? But I have to leave Lecter behind in a secure storage lock-up because I’m on my way to have lunch with Dr. Armstrong to talk about the white violin. I’m not sure Lecter can hear, exactly, but he can tap into my senses eerily well at times, and I have a feeling that having him listening to the conversation I intend to have would be a really bad idea.

  And so, to the office with the disturbing dimensions and the secret stash of really rather good single malt – not that I plan on consuming any: I need my wits about me.

  “Ah, Mo! Come in, come in.” Most people do office casual only on Friday, if at all, so I’m slightly taken aback to be confronted by the SA in a knitted wool cardigan and tartan bedroom slippers. I enter anyway. “Is something the matter?” he asks, focusing over my shoulder.