The Annihilation Score

by Charles Stross

  “Good to see you; I was just about to—” I gesture at the entrance.

  The officer in the doorway raises a hand. “You can’t come in—”

  I hold up my warrant card. “O’Brien, TPCF. I’m here to see Inspector Hoare.” I show him my teeth: “My colleague here is Chief Superintendent Grey.”

  “Ah, right.” He takes in Jim and his eyes widen as he falls back, retreating into the shadowed station lobby. “Please wait here, sir, ma’am, I’ll be right back.” He scampers away hastily.

  I glance at Jim. “Shall we?”

  Jim gestures: “After you.”

  The interior of the disused tube station is a bit grubby but otherwise in remarkably good repair. The floor tiles are uncracked and the wood panels on the walls are still solid, there’s no rubbish, no sign of peeling paint or graffiti. But the frames for information posters and advertisements are empty, the ticket barriers are archaic—there isn’t a single Oyster Card reader in sight—and I haven’t seen that style of glass-fronted booth in ages. It takes me all the way back to nostalgia-tinged memories of childhood, a school trip to the big city many years before I came to make my home here.

  It’s hard to see into the station beyond the ticket barriers. I can just about make out a broad corridor with shadowed openings to either side, but I see no sign of escalators. The Piccadilly line runs deep and land prices in this part of London are high. This must have been one of the stations designed to be served by lifts.

  The constable who was on door duty comes hurrying back, leading Inspector Hoare, a bluff-looking guy who eyeballs us briefly and straightens his back at the sight of Jim’s shoulder flashes. He looks as if he’s just swallowed a frog. You expected the monkey; you shouldn’t be surprised when she brings the organ-grinder along. “This is Chief Super Jim Grey, from TPCF,” I tell him. “I’m Dr. O’Brien, TPCF Director.” I show him just enough of a smile to draw the sting. “Now, suppose you show us what’s wrong?”

  “Yes, absolutely. This way.” He waves us through the dead ticket barriers. “Watch your footing, there’s been a leak in here recently and the floor can be slippery.” He lifts up a torch and points it at a pitch-black tunnel behind the barriers. “That’s the passage to the passenger lifts down to the platform. They’re missing.”

  I follow Jim forward, keeping my eyes peeled. It’s a not-dissimilar layout to the other lift-only Underground stations—a stubby corridor terminating in a dead end, lift doors to either side. Except, where the doors should be, there are solid stainless steel panels. They glint dully in Jim’s torch beam. “These panels aren’t supposed to be here?”

  “Definitely not: they’re supposed to be sliding doors opening onto functioning lifts. And there’s more.” Hoare walks past us in the direc tion of a door at the end of the passage, labelled STAFF ONLY. He produces a huge bunch of battered-looking keys and unlocks it. “This is a spiral staircase. Emergency exit, you really do not want to have to use it—there are over two hundred steps. At least there were yesterday.” He pulls the door open, to reveal another stainless steel panel.

  “These aren’t some kind of regular barrier?” asks Jim. “Fitted during maintenance? Maybe TfL have some work scheduled?”

  “Sorry, sir.” Hoare sounds anything but sorry. “Already excluded. That was the first thing we looked into.”

  Jim steps close to the sheet of metal. He twists the head of his torch until the beam is dazzlingly sharp, then slowly directs it around the edges of the frame. “I see no prints or tracks.”

  “No, sir. Looks like it was installed from the rear side. It’s the same with the lift shafts.”

  How do you take over a disused tube station? Well, if you can come in from below you can move heavy equipment into place without anyone noticing up top. The trouble is in the from below bit. The tube network is one of the most heavily traveled railway systems in the UK. Yes, it shuts down for four to five hours every night while they kill the traction power and carry out cleaning and maintenance work, but that doesn’t mean it’s deserted. Quite the opposite: it should be crawling with staff and contractors.

  “We should take a look at the blocked tunnel entrance.” I say aloud.

  “I can sort that out,” says Hoare. “But I’m not saying you’ll find it useful.”

  “And look up everyone who’s had maintenance access to the branch line in the past year.”

  Hoare twitches. “Now that is an interesting question . . .”

  * * *

  Later, standing just back from the odd experimental warning signs at the end of Platform 5 under Holborn, I check my watch. It’s pushing eleven. “I’m keeping you from your meeting,” I tell Jim. “This doesn’t need both of us. Frankly, I think it’s a wild goose chase and I’d just as soon throw it back at—”

  “I already cancelled.” Jim is dismissive. “While I should, strictly speaking, be flying a desk, it does me good to get out once in a while and stick my nose into the real world—even if it’s a less productive use of my time than organizing people and issuing policy directives. Which this isn’t, by the way—unproductive use of time, I mean, mine or yours. The more experience of routine investigations you get, the better you’ll understand the needs of the police units you’re supporting.”

  There is something wrong with Jim’s analysis, something very slightly off-kilter, but it takes me a few seconds to put my finger on it: he’s looking at my responsibilities purely from a policing point of view. He’s put me in a frame and moved it sideways, obscuring part of the big picture of what the Home Office needs, much less what the Laundry is trying to accomplish here, and focusing on his own preoccupations. Does he expect me to go native? But then again, he is a cop. It would be weird if he didn’t view everything in terms of his own organization’s needs.

  I’m about to mention this to him when the tracks beside the deserted platform begin to rattle and hum. A bright yellow locomotive comes rolling out of the tunnel at the opposite end of the platform at walking pace. It’s a battery-electric locomotive: one of the maintenance machines that can operate in the tube tunnels when the traction current is switched off.

  It grates to a halt just before it reaches us, the ventilation fans on the panels covering its immense lead-acid battery packs humming. The driver opens his door. “O’Brien and Grey?” he asks.

  “That’s us,” Jim says. He climbs aboard, and I follow him. The cab is surprisingly cramped. It’s short enough that there isn’t room for me to lay Lecter’s case on the floor in a straight line from front to back; the seats are padded flaps that fold down from the rear wall.

  Our driver is a short, wiry guy in TfL uniform and Sikh turban. “What do you want to see today?” he asks.

  “I think we’d like to look at the Aldwych branch line,” I say brightly.

  To my irritation, he doesn’t respond until Jim echoes me: “We hear it’s been blocked off overnight and we want to take a look at the obstruction.”

  “Right, that’s what I thought. Let me call Earl’s Court and confirm.” He picks up an antiquated-looking Bakelite phone handset and begins speaking in an oddly formal steam-powered dialect of air traffic control jargon. When he hangs up he looks at us, avoiding my eyes: “We’ll be moving soon.”

  We wait. And we wait some more. And suddenly the red light we’re staring at just outside the tunnel mouth goes out and a green light goes on above it, and we begin to move forward. I haul out my smartphone and point it out the windscreen, recording video.

  “Eyes left,” says Jim. I pan to take in the left-hand side of the tunnel. We slowly gather speed until we’re rattling along at what seems like a terrific clip, but is probably no more than ten miles per hour. More signal lights appear in the tunnel ahead, green with a diagonal white slash illuminated above them. “That’s us,” says the driver. We begin to slow. I glance at the tachograph in front of the driver and see it’s reading seven or
eight miles per hour. So that’s how fast we’re going when we see the red light ahead and he throws on the brakes. We screech to a halt in plenty of time to see the bricked-up circle of the dead end ahead of us, the track ending at a pair of suspiciously shiny-looking buffers.

  “That’s not supposed to be there,” our driver complains. “It wasn’t there yesterday—” He sounds as if he’s doubting his own sanity.

  “What wasn’t?” I ask.

  “The buffers. That wall.” He points: “There’s supposed to be another half mile of track, then the western platform. With an old Northern Line train parked alongside it.”

  “You’re telling me someone just walled off a tube tunnel, overnight?” Jim sounds as disbelieving as I feel.

  “Oh yes.” Our driver checks a couple of dials, then throws a big switch: “All righty, that’s the end of the line. Now, if you’d care to follow me single file to the other cab, it’s time to go back . . .”

  * * *

  I get back to the office just after lunchtime, and steal ten minutes to type up a report on whatever the hell just ate my morning. I upload the video from my phone and email it to Sam for his urgent attention—then head for the first of what promises to be a lengthy series of sessions with a pair of very sympathetic investigators from the IPCC. My afternoon is then enriched immeasurably by an hour with a senior body from Human Resources at SS HQ, then half an hour alone with my homework (I am ploughing my way through Butterworths Police Law in my spare time, wondering what I did in a previous life to deserve this), and then a briefing by two amiable Health and Safety folks who are here to give me a helpful orientation briefing on what I can do to contribute to a healthy and safe workplace environment.

  Not going head-to-head with neo-Nazi superpowered hooligans or maniacs possessed by class four demons would be a good start; not being trusted to carry around a necromantic occult artifact with a taste for souls that talks to me in my sleep would be another. But, as Bob would say, I digress.

  Around five, I find myself in another meeting. This time it’s with Ramona and Mhari, who in the past few weeks have gone from triggering panic attacks to being among the more comfortingly predictable elements of my life. (Strange days indeed.)

  “So, I got the CRB-enhanced checks through on The Torch and Busy Bee,” says Mhari, “and the good news is, they’re clean enough for our purposes. Busy Bee had a checkered childhood, but we’re required to ignore anything prior to the eighteenth birthday except convictions in adult court for serious criminal offenses—and she was basically an activist. Went on marches, not burglaries. From university onwards she’s been politically engaged, but at the good-citizen end of the spectrum. We might have a headache if we were vetting her for the Laundry, but for the Home Office . . . well, we can kick this up a level if necessary. It’s not as if we’re overflowing with candidates, is it? As for The Torch, he’s boringly clean.”

  “Good. If you have any doubts you should ask Jim about Bee’s background and what it means. Do you want to invite them back for a second interview if the news is good?” I ask.

  “We can do that,” she says. She sounds pleased with herself. “Should Jim sit in on this round?”

  “Yes, about that,” I say, and give them a dump of my current thoughts on the subject. “It’s not that I don’t trust him because of”—I point at the ceiling—“but more a case of my not wanting him to hitch our little red wagon too tightly to his own special interests. We have to keep the big picture in mind. We operate with the privileges and duties of police officers, but we are not here solely to provide the Met or ACPO with backup. We need police powers because we have to operate in public, but we’re not here to play cops and robbers with bad guys: there’s a reason we’ve got the word Coordination in our name.”

  “As you say.”

  Mhari looks as if she’s chewing it over. Meanwhile, Ramona has another issue to raise: “Are we on to any other business yet? Have you had any new thoughts about the uniform question?”

  I twitch, remembering the fate of my #2 suit. “There’s definitely a case for us to have protective gear available for field work; I’m less sure about the brief for us to play superhero dress-up. How far did you get to with that, anyway?”

  “I put in a bit of time earlier in the week and came up with some ideas, yes.” Ramona wakes her tablet, swipes a few times to bring up an image, and spins it around so Mhari and I can see it. “What do you think?”

  “I think”—I pause—“it looks very Daft Punk.” Or maybe Daft Punk goes Territorial Support Group/SWAT team.

  “Part of our remit is to counter the cult of personality that goes with the whole public perception of superheroes,” Ramona points out. “Nothing tilts the scale away from grandstanding individual and towards organization body like having a de-individualizing uniform. Any uniform you decide we should standardize on needs to define a corporate identity—unavoidably one that plays off existing police uniforms, because of the nature of the organization. It also needs to provide protection from hazards, and you said you wanted to avoid the cheesecake problem.” By which she means the popular expectation that women with exotic powers should wear six-inch stilettos, fishnets, and implausible corsetry while courting hypothermia as they fight crime. (An expectation which has more to do with the historic age and gender distribution of the weekly comics consumer demographic than with, for example, a PHANG’s desire to avoid exposure to sunlight or my own strong preference not to show off my impending middle-aged spread.)

  I look at Ramona’s proposed outfits. The chrome and silver motorcycle helmets with odd bumps for antennae and mirrored-glass faceplates—I can see why that would appeal to Mhari. The pointy top to the helmet, with the blue beacon, is an obvious shout-out to Officer Friendly’s kit. The rest of the outfit reminds me of something else: “These are motorcycle leathers.”

  “Actually, they’re Kevlar,” Ramona explains. “With cervical airbags and extra padding around ankles, kneecaps, and elbows—just like high-end biker kit. But they’re actually next-generation riot gear. It looks like motorcycle protective gear because it’s designed to do much the same job—provide whole-body protection from blunt or sharp trauma and being thrown about. The cervical airbag is a biker thing, and bikers are taking to them to save their necks when they put down a ride at high speed; it seems to me that if we end up going hand-to-hand against someone with super-strength, they’ll be a life-saver. Or at least a spinal-injury preventer. I’ve also spec’d out earthed chainmail inserts in case of lightning or tasers, and heavy-duty wards in case of the usual.”

  “I take your point,” I say carefully. “But isn’t the overall effect a bit Darth Vader? I mean, all you need to add is a cape and a light saber. We’re supposed to be operating as police, not imperial stormtroopers. What message does this look send?”

  “I am the law, motherfucker, are you feeling lucky?” suggests Ramona.

  “People.” I pause for a moment. “Remind me of Peel’s Principles of Policing, again?” Ramona looks blank. Mhari looks skeptical. “Policing by consent,” I hint. “Come on, the basic rules we play by? Minimum use of force to achieve compliance, the performance of a police force is judged best by how little crime takes place on their watch rather than by how many heads they kick in, that kind of thing?”

  “Since when do flying chavs with the ability to set fire to anything they look at consent to be policed?” Mhari crosses her arms. “We don’t get called out until there’s already a public order problem. At which point . . .” She looks to Ramona for support.

  “If a little bit of pre-emptive intimidation saves us from having to fight, I’m all in favor of it,” she agrees.

  “Hmm.” I stare at the blueprints for the Mark One Home Office Imperial Stormtrooper uniform some more. The male version comes over as distinctly Judge Dredd, but the female fitted variant is mercifully cleavage-free, doesn’t show off the wearer’s cellul
ite, and has boots that look like they’d be more at home kicking down doors than tottering around a bordello. “Need to sleep on this. Huh.” Next item. “Mhari, did you get anywhere with the origin story?”

  Mhari shakes her head tiredly. “I was talking to Jez Wilson, Gerry Lockhart, and Pete Russell—they’ve formed an ad-hoc committee to draw together a big lie suitable for public disclosure that remains consistent with everything that’s already accidentally leaked. It’s not just a front-page story, but a bunch of elaborate conspiracy theories to satisfy the tinfoil hat crowd. The headliner is that it’s a mutant descendant of SARS, but the backup stories blame the Fukushima meltdowns, mercury preservatives in vaccines, and a rogue nanobiological warfare experiment by the US government.”

  “Well.” I stare at Mhari. She stares back at me. “I take it you’re not happy with these options.”

  “Are you?” she shoots right back.

  “Dumb and dumber.” I shake my head. “On the other hand, the kind of people who obsess at length about where superpowers come from . . .”

  “We just need to distract them for a couple more years,” Mhari reminds me. “Make them keep chasing after half-truths and lies. Sooner or later, CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN is going to leak—it’s just a matter of time—and then we won’t need an origin story anymore.”

  “Well.” I resist the urge to clutch my head. “I suppose you’re right, in the long term, but none of those are exactly helpful—”

  “Why not?” asks Ramona.

  “Because they all push epidemic or pollution narratives.” I resist the urge to snap: “They paint us as contaminated. It’s deeply unsettling to ordinary members of the public because it has echoes of ritual uncleanliness that go back a long way. The whole superhero narrative is flawed, anyway—it’s a stand-in for the old-time Greek and Roman pantheons, ultra-powerful gods with dysfunctional emotional lives—we’re going to be perceived as unstable by default, and now we’ve got some committee trying to convince us to play the part of contaminated untouchables?”