The Annihilation Score

by Charles Stross

  Oh God. I can just see the headlines: Superhero team touches down between goal posts at Old Trafford: Pitch ruined. I take a white-knuckled grip on my armrests as the doleful wailing of doomed dolphins lowers in pitch and the straps tighten around my torso. We’re going in: un-trained, un-drilled, un-practiced, un-briefed, and we’re not even the right team. We don’t have a catchy name, an origin story, or matching underwear. The probability of this turning into an utter, irremediable clusterfuck approaches unity.

  I close my eyes and hope the others don’t pick up on my nerves. Because I have a terrible premonition that things are going to get a lot worse, before there’s any chance whatsoever of them getting better.

  * * *

  Eight minutes after departure we land in the car park of the Werneth mosque, just across Manchester Street from Werneth Park in Oldham. The sky is slate gray, a cold drizzle is falling, and a pall of smoke rises above the houses and shops to our north. The car park is littered with half-bricks and broken bottles; the only reason the mosque’s windows aren’t smashed is the bars protecting them. A convoy of police vans are parked nose-to-tail on the main road, sliding doors open and mesh screens deployed across their windshields. The distant roar of an angry crowd drifts across from further up the road, in the direction of the city center: they’re chanting loud slogans, something ugly about Muslims. Other voices rise against them in counterpoint with another chant. Two tribes, trying to drown each other out. Or, given the weather, trying to provoke the other side into opening their mouths wide enough to drown in the rain.

  A mobile police command center is parked in front of the mosque, obviously positioned to send a message to any hotheads who get too carried away—and also because the mosque is surrounded by high spiked railings and brick walls. Neighborhood relations here clearly leave something to be desired.

  When we arrive, the incident commander (a regular Superintendent) is calmly speaking into a Tetra headset while the staff of the command center direct mobile units around the high-detail maps on their computer screens. There are other screens displaying the camera feed from the helicopter overhead and a handful of camera vans. “Where is he now?” asks the Super. “Good. Try to keep him there. I’ll have more resources for you shortly.” She ends the call and stares at us. “What took you so long?”

  I clear my throat. “We were in London when we got the call, then in communications blackout during travel.”

  “Understood. So let me make this clear up front: I’m running this show. I point you and pull the trigger, and you do what I say. As long as you bear that in mind, we’ll get along fine. Who are you?”

  “I’m Dr. O’Brien, Transhuman Policy Coordination director.” I pull out my warrant card. “This is my team: Officer Friendly, Ramona Random, and the White Mask. Your turf, your show, understood. But who are you, ma’am?”

  “Superintendent Alice Christie, Greater Manchester Police.” She unfreezes: “Okay, I’ve heard a lot about you,” she tells Officer Friendly. “This should be right up your street.”

  I put myself forward: I don’t want her bypassing me and going straight to Jim. “What’s the situation on the ground?”

  “Bad.” She has a cop’s roving eyes. From her expression as she gives us a second once-over she isn’t sure she likes what she’s seeing. “The EDL filed a 3175 two weeks ago. About 250 supporters were due to assemble on Railway Road at one p.m. and march down Manchester Road to Copster Hill—right past this mosque—then disperse. They started in the pub and got a bit rowdy, as usual, but that’s when AFA sprang an illegal lightning counter-demo on us—they organized a flash mob, converged on St Thomas’s Church, then headed on course to collide with the EDL right here. The Anti-Fascists got a turnout of about 100 to 150 bodies, and the locals aren’t exactly EDL supporters either.”

  The English Defense League—self-named—are the knuckle-dragging wing of the British neo-Nazi racist fringe. They claim to want to defend England for the English, defined as anyone who’s white working class. They hate immigrants, the police, and anyone who can count without using their fingers; they like football, cheap beer and curry, and trouble. (Don’t ask me how they square the curry/immigrant circle.) Any time they march in a dirt-poor neighborhood that’s 25 percent Muslim (like Oldham) you can guarantee they generate a robust response from the locals and produce a huge headache for the Police.

  Officer Friendly rotates his helmet in my direction, then back to Christie: the nearest thing to a glance his robo-suit will let him make. “Who escalated first?” he asks.

  “At first we had the EDL nicely boxed, but when AFA jumped us we had to call in all our support units. We were getting ready to kettle the illegals when the Fash got wind there was a counter-demo and about a dozen of them broke through our line and headed for Wellington Road. Which is a bit of a slog, frankly—you might have noticed the landscape hereabouts is a bit steep—and the officers on the ground didn’t manage to head them off in time. So then we had the charming prospect of a dozen idiots with baseball bats charging at a much larger group who were looking for trouble.

  “Then somebody set fire to one of our vans and everything went to hell.” She shakes her head. “Lucky there was nobody in it at the time. We thought at first it was terrorism-related, but no, intel from ground level says it looks like the Fash have a super-skinhead who is flying, throwing lightning bolts, and shouting ‘fuck off back to Pakistan or I’ll stick a pig up your ass’ at the AFA. Charming.” Her irony is leaden. “I’d have him under a section 4 if I had the firepower to make it stick. Anyway, that’s when I asked the Chief to send up the bat-signal for you people—but it gets worse.

  “Right in the middle of me trying to contain two different demos the sky turned funny. Forward Intel says there’s a Djinn upstairs fucking with the weather! So there’s a Nazi Übermensch on a beer-fueled rampage, some kind of supernatural maniac throwing lightning bolts upstairs, and there’s not a damned thing I can do except keep the mundane demonstrators kettled up where they can’t cause any collateral damage.” She doesn’t sound happy.

  “Well,” I say, “Officer Friendly is sworn in with the London Met, on secondment to ACPO; he’s also an authorizing officer for firearms and other weapons. I, myself, and my other colleagues, are not police officers—my unit isn’t fully operational yet. However, we’re affiliated with the Security Service and can provide backup for Officer Friendly. If you point us at this, uh, Übermensch and his pal and pull the trigger, we can try to take him down. So I suggest we”—I gesture to include myself, Ramona, and Mhari—“handle communications and coordination while the Tin Man here does the heavy lifting.”

  “Right, that sounds like a reasonable plan. As long as you stick to a supporting role.” She waves over a PC who’s waiting by the screens at the back: “You, take these specials to Inspector Cho. He can direct them at the scene.”

  * * *

  There is nothing heroic or noble about the wake of a riot. Broken glass and dog shit on the pavements, the choking smells of burning plastic and petrol, damp-streaked red-brick terrace houses with their windows smashed. The ferocious barking of chained pit bulls defending their yards mingles with the off-key team chants of hatred keeping time with the stamping of feet from up the steep, potholed street. The sky is as gray as the roads and the grass, and the rain just keeps on coming.

  “The EDL are kettled two streets over,” says Inspector Cho, pointing. He is in full riot gear, which tells me at once that I’m underdressed for this dance.

  “Understood,” blats Officer Friendly. “The superpowered one?”

  “He was over there”—he gestures at the end of Monmouth Street, where two fire engines are hesitantly probing for a way past an overturned van towards an ominous column of rising smoke—“throwing cars at the other one.” He winces. “That stopped about a minute before you turned up—”

  A white Transit van, bonnet flopping open, rises
above the swaybacked roofline of a row of back-to-back terraces, and crashes into the road just in front of the fire engines. I flinch at the bang. So does Inspector Cho, as do the other cops who form a loose line across the other side of the street. “Jesus!”

  “Incoming,” Ramona says tonelessly. An iridescent bubble appears around her motorized wheelchair. I dry-swallow, then open my violin case. I don’t know what exactly I can do with Lecter if they’re throwing two-ton vans at each other, but it feels better to have my sly monster in hand. I turn him upside down to shield his strings from the rain, wishing I’d brought an umbrella.

  “Let me handle this,” says Officer Friendly. He takes two steps forward, gathers himself, and jumps. Unlike you or me, he soars above the houses on the other side of the main road, where he hovers briefly—until a violet-white spark of lightning flashes down from the clouds, and he plummets.

  “Fuck,” says the White Mask. She blurs forward. One of the riot cops turns towards her and she vaults over him, using his shoulders as a platform: he goes sprawling as she sprints into a side alley between two terraced houses.

  I’m in the process of raising my violin when there’s a tooth-grating crashing sound. Officer Friendly wobbles into the air on the far side of the terrace and I gasp with relief.

  But then there’s a shout: “C’mere if yer think yer ’ard enough!”

  I catch Ramona’s eye. “Mhari needs backup.”

  She nods and begins to roll forward. I trot alongside her wheelchair. The cops take one look at us and make way. We head for the same backyard that the White Mask vanished into, the one Officer Friendly came down in.

  The streets are narrow and cling to the steeply sloping sides of the valleys where they were built to provide cheap housing for mid-nineteenth-century mill workers. The houses are built back-to-back and shoulder-to-shoulder so that they each have only one exterior wall. Each row is pierced at intervals by dank tunnels that lead into the yards at the rear, giving access to the back of the row. They’re cramped and cold and prone to rising damp, and the only reason they still exist is that the people who live in them don’t have the money to live anywhere better. This part of the world has been living in an economic downturn since the early 1980s, like a never-ending bad dream.

  The alley Mhari ducked into is slimy with lichen, cobblestoned, and piled half-high with domestic trash along one wall. It stinks of decaying cabbage overlaid by a tang of more exotic spices, cumin and tamarind and methi. Something feels wrong to me but I don’t have time to pay attention to that right now. The yard at the end is partitioned by rotting wooden fences to either side, terminated by a brick wall at the back. “Where—” I begin to say, then Ramona waves for silence.

  “Aaaah! Aah! Aaah!”

  It’s a wheezing gasp, from the far side of one fence. It sounds human and repetitive: someone is panting for breath. The gasping trails off into a hoarse whine, as if they’re in so much pain they can’t scream anymore.

  A shadow overhead: it’s Officer Friendly. He lands beyond the wall with a rattling crash.

  Another shadow passes over us, and I look up into a swirling cloud with the face of a man, snarling hatred at something that crawls across the ground below.

  “Bastard motherfucker!” someone beyond the wall screams. My hair is trying to stand on end, my scalp prickling with a gathering premonition of thunder. I raise my violin and witness the scene around me through Lecter’s senses: hollow stone skulls lie in rows up and down the spine of a drowning world that teems with unclean verminous human life, crackling and hissing with imbecile thoughts, easily stilled by my will. Overhead, a slowly whirling vortex of power gathers its force to strike at a mantis-like presence of pure energy wearing the body of a wiry man with tattooed skin and swastikas on his knuckles who stands and shrieks defiance at the sky. “Fookin’ immigrant Paki! Fook off back to raghead land or I’ll fookin stab you in the fookin’ balls!”

  I snap back into my own head as the cloud above us begins to swirl faster. That’s not good. I move my fingers into position and set bow to string, pulling in a note, and then changing key and shifting, looking for the right harmonic to drain the life-energy out of the thing in the sky.

  ***You want me to do what?*** Lecter is surprised.

  There’s a loud crunch as Ramona rams her wheelchair into a rotting gate. She pulls back, rams again, and the gate collapses. She rides over it like a tank fording a river—then she screams. A pale green glow suffuses everything, the gathering energy of a lightning strike. We shouldn’t even be here, I think distantly as I raise my weapon and take aim, we’re management, not heroes.

  There is a pink-blue flash so intense that it blinds me, followed instantaneously by an explosion. I stagger and my feet go out from under me on the wet cobblestones and I fall over, but whatever the lightning bolt struck it wasn’t me: I’m deafened and dazzled but I’m still alive. I hear distant screams, then a repetitive thudding. It reminds me of distant rocketry over the Beqaa valley. I try to stand, shivering with suppressed panic: If you can hear them, they’re not coming your way, I remember.

  “Are you all right?” It’s Officer Friendly. He lifts me to my feet and I lean against him for a moment.

  “Well that didn’t work too well,” I manage.

  “Are you all right?” he repeats, then peers at me: “I’m going after Ramona. Wait here?”

  I nod dizzily, and manage to step back while he turns and darts through the broken gate where Ramona vanished. The sobbing, hoarse-voiced moaning from inside the house is back and it sets my teeth on edge. Fuck this, I think, and strike up a lullaby for monsters. Going after the Djinn didn’t work too well, but he’s not my only target today.

  The strings begin to glow as I hit the simple melody; I play faster, fingertips sore. I know how to hit the right frequency to captivate minds, soothe them into sleep. All my people have wards, but I’m betting the random superstrong idiot shouting imprecations at the sky doesn’t. I don’t need to overdrive this, I just need to make him fall asleep as if he’s had one tinnie of Special Brew too many. As for the angry face in the sky, I have a theory about that.

  I hear a hammering crash from the yard where Ramona, Officer Friendly, and Mhari have gone to make their arrest. The shouting and sobbing and screaming—none of it theirs—slowly fades to the tune of rock-a-bye baby.

  Suddenly I’m nose-to-nose with Mhari’s expressionless white mask. “You can stop that now,” she says tensely. “Jim’s got his man. It’s a real mess in there, we have injured civilians.”

  I look up at the whirling clouds above. Is it my imagination or do they seem to be trying to form a funnel? “It’s not over. Let’s get backup.”

  I trot after Mhari as she zips back in the direction of the Police line. I catch up with her as she delivers the news to Cho: “Two civilian casualties need medical attention urgently, Officer Friendly is also requesting a shielded heavy custody vehicle for the super he’s restraining—”

  I clear my throat. “No time, M—White Mask. We have to get back to the mosque right now.”

  Cho turns on me: “Why? What’s so—”

  I point a finger straight up: “One down, one to go.”

  “Shit,” Mhari says succinctly. “You’re sure—”

  ***Look in the classrooms behind the prayer hall,*** Lecter whispers in the back of my head. He sounds drily amused. His ghostly laughter echoes in my head like the papery rustling of mummified hands raised in applause.

  “Come on!” The clouds are still turning, gray-purple and ominously engorged. “We’ve got to move right now.”

  The broken sky tries to murder me as I cross the road. I keep Lecter raised, fingering a C sharp like an arrow held against a taut bowstring. When the brilliant pink flash hammers down at me and splashes off across the cobblestones all around, I feel a distant tingling, but nothing more. Lecter can eat more types of energy th
an souls. The sky thunders its rage and disapproval, mouthing imprecations at the tiny figures below.

  Superintendent Christie barrels out of the command center, followed by a pair of bobbies: “Why are you back again?” she demands.

  I point at the front door of the mosque. “You need to search the classrooms in back. You’re looking for a man with a book, ritual trappings, and a sacrifice.” A black goat would be standard, if they can rustle one up at this kind of notice, otherwise a chicken. I’m pretty sure it’s considered haram to do that ritual at all, let alone in the grounds of a mosque, but then—

  “What for? We can’t just storm a mosque!”

  “There’s your reasonable grounds for suspicion,” I say. I point up at the circling clouds which briefly form the visage of a scowling man’s face: “You’re looking at a weather control invocation. Officer Friendly is busy pacifying your Übermensch and the rest of us don’t have your legal authority.”

  Christie follows my finger, then nods jerkily. “You’d better be right.” The implicit or else hangs in the air as she turns to her two escorts: “Follow me!” Then she storms up the steps to the front door of the mosque and hammers on it. “Police!”

  The door opens. I take the steps two at a time behind her. The caretaker—or possibly imam—falls back. “You can’t come in here,” he says half-heartedly.

  “Yes, I can. I’ve been informed that a crime may be in progress on these premises.” Christie glances over her shoulder at me: I don’t need to be a telepath to know she’s thinking, If you’re wrong about this, it’s your ass. “Which way are your classrooms?”

  “Round the corridor, but miss, you can’t—” He falls back in front of her, protesting all the way.

  She’s polite but firm, very firm, taking no shit. “How many classrooms do you have here? Are there fire exits? Which way are they? Where—okay. You have two seconds to open this door or I’m going to do it myself, don’t make me wait—”