The Annihilation Score

by Charles Stross

  “You’ve got to admit, it’s a step up from Dracula,” Mhari says drily.

  “Well.” I try not to roll my eyes. Then I remember my early morning legwork. “Which reminds me: something new came up this morning.” I tell them about Aldwych, then add the latest report from Sam. “The actual tunnel entrance has been blocked with brick backed with reinforced concrete; nobody’s sure how thick it is, but it’s a very professional job. TfL are looking into the maintenance contractors’ logs to see who might have had access to the spur tunnel, but it’s possible whoever decided to block it off ran an entire train load of cement, aggregate, and other construction materials inside before they did the deed.”

  “How much tunnel are we talking about?” Ramona asks.

  I read my email, repeating the highlights aloud: “Two tunnels with platforms connected via an overhead walkway . . . we’re looking at one kilometer of underground railway tunnel, and two platforms—one of which has been converted, with its track section replaced by offices, storage facilities, and a 1950s hostel for immigrant laborers which is said to be haunted. (I’m not making that up.)” I look up from my tablet. “Any suggestions?”

  Mhari is skeptical. “Doesn’t sound like superpowers to me. Sounds like the opposite, in fact—someone without superpowers. Like, oh, maybe another department that didn’t tell TfL they were borrowing a semi-surplus tube station for something? Ministry of Defense? They used to use the deep tube tunnels for bomb-proof storage—”

  “But why—”

  “Wild goose chase, Mo,” Ramona says firmly. “Just because the Transport Police thought it was flaky, it does not follow that it’s our kind of flaky.”

  I really do roll my eyes this time. “You think they gulled me.”

  “I didn’t say that.” I notice Ramona’s shared glance with Mhari. “You should consider taking some time off. I know you think you’ve got a lot of catching up to do, but you can only work seventy hours a week with homework on top for so long before you burn out.”

  “Yes!” says Mhari. “You’re not a twenty-something, Mo. You don’t have the stamina.”

  “And you do? You’re a—” I catch myself just in time.

  “Yes,” she snaps. “I can work a hundred hours a week if I have to. I just have to drink someone’s, someone’s—” She takes a deep breath. “It’s not worth it. Not unless it’s an emergency. Mo, we need you intact. You’ve been going at the job like a lunatic since we got back from Manchester: apart from that radio you listen to after everyone else clocks off, you’ve got no outlets. But it’s business as usual. What happens if an emergency comes up and you’ve got no reserves? We don’t have a fully formed management structure; we haven’t in-processed the new recruits for training yet—we’ve been in business for barely a month. You’re still a single point of failure for the unit, and you’re actively damaging yourself.”

  “Mo, please”—Ramona joins in on her side before I can reply—“take some time off. If you’re going to work weekends, at least give yourself three evenings a week when you clock off at six and don’t come in until nine the next morning. Or start taking your weekends seriously. Or something.”

  I look between them, feeling bewildered by their betrayal. On a coldly rational level, they’re absolutely right, but on a gut level it feels like a stab in the back. “You planned this!”

  “Yes, Mo.” Ramona gives me a look that suddenly makes me wonder how I look to her right now. “You’re not going to slow down on your own, are you? You’ve been running with the brakes off ever since the treaty meeting—” She stops as Mhari looks away from me briefly, tension evident in the set of her neck. Oh.

  Yes, I am probably working too hard; I’ve got a department to set up and insufficient staff and support. And besides, what is there waiting for me to go home to? A cat? A bed haunted by ghosts? Yes, I admit my dancing partner has been back for a few whirls around the nightmare, and has given me a pointed nudge or two in the direction of an evil dream opera score. But that’s why I’m doing it, that’s why I’m working every day until I drop: it’s the only way to be sure I’ll sleep soundly. “I’ll think about it.”

  “You’ll have to do better than that.” Mhari winds up to badger me again. I’m not sure how she’s doing this: her body language reads scared/juggling live grenades. Am I still that frightening? “It’ll be nightfall in, oh, another hour. You can go home, but wouldn’t you rather come out with us? Girls’ night out, team-building exercise, whatever you want to call it.”

  “I don’t feel much like dancing, thanks.”

  “You don’t have to; you just have to let go of the job for a few hours! Can you even do that anymore? Because if not, you just proved my point.”

  “Oh hell.” I surrender: she’s got me bang to rights. “If you’ve got nothing better to do than drag me round wine bars for an evening, I shall just have to surrender gracefully.” I force myself to smile. In truth, there’s a knot of tension behind my sternum that does not dissolve in relief at the idea of spending an evening in the company of a vampire and a mermaid who both once upon a time had carnal relationships with my currently separated husband. It sounds dangerously like a mashup of The Addams Family with Friends, and if that doesn’t have you reaching for the Gaviscon, your stomach is stronger than mine. But on the other hand, it’s an excuse to avoid a certain textbook that’s been gnawing at my brain of late—and we don’t have to talk about Bob. “Let me wrap up in here and I’ll see you at seven.”

  * * *

  . . . And that is the start of a slippery slope which ends with me standing on a spotlit stage to give the performance of my life to an audience of thousands bewitched by a Mad Scientist, blood trickling from my fingertips as I struggle for control of the melody that will usher in the overture to the end of the world.

  But that doesn’t happen until much later . . .

  PART 3

  “GOOD HEAVENS, MISS SAKAMOTO! YOU’RE BEAUTIFUL!”

  13.

  CAPTIVATION

  We meet in the lobby a whisker after seven and form a post-work posse: one of those groups of hard-partying office ladies you see around central London after working hours. In our case the partying is relatively sedate. One of us is in a wheelchair, another can’t go anywhere with black-light illumination, and I’m over forty and have been working so hard I’m feeling my age.

  Luckily there’s a nice little bistro round the corner that has a duck confit to die for, a shelf of fascinating artisanal London gins which they serve in ancient jam jars, and modern jazz background music that doesn’t set my teeth on edge. So that’s where we start, with the idea of working our way on from there.

  We eat, and we talk, and Ramona and Mhari systematically steal the conversation whenever I try to steer it back towards work. To my horror, they want to talk about personal stuff. But not my personal stuff: their personal stuff. Ramona has been stuck in a very expensive hotel room since she arrived—she needs a whirlpool bath more than she needs a bed—and she’s having difficulty looking for a flat to rent that is wheelchair-accessible and has a suitable bathroom but doesn’t cost a bazillion pounds a week. On the other hand, she’s commuting from the North Sea each weekend: “I just go home and head for the unthinking depths,” she says, “where I school.” You couldn’t make it up.

  Mhari looks at her enviously. “No strings on me,” she says, uptight. Ramona, of course, takes this as a challenge and enlists my assistance in crowbarring Mhari open. By the third large glass of pinot I wish she hadn’t; I’ve learned more than I ever wanted to about Mhari’s problems hanging on to long-term boyfriends, even before she contracted her unfortunate condition. “’S funny: I should have gotten my fangs into him a lot harder, except I didn’t have fangs back then,” she says of her most recent ex. She chuckles unhappily at some personal joke that I don’t get, then upends the last few drops from the bottle into her glass. “You don’t know what
you’ve got until it slips through your fingers.”

  This strikes uncomfortably close to home, so I ask them whether they’re also wondering if these three-sigma and above superpowers are on a one-way trip to K syndrome city, thereby giving them an excuse to glare at me and change the subject. Derailing: three can play at that game.

  We manage to hit another wine bar but it’s only just past ten o’clock when I realize I’m yawning so furiously I have to excuse myself. I’m wobbling on my feet, and not just from three glasses of wine. The Japanese have a word for it, of course: karoshi, death through overwork.

  I’m tired and tipsy, so instead of grappling with bus and tube I use an app to call a private hire cab. I pay cash and the driver drops me at my front door, where I stagger in, go straight upstairs, and faceplant on the bed. It’s my first undisturbed and dreamless night of sleep in ages.

  A week passes. I attend more meetings and training courses than seems humanly possible, get politely grilled by an Assistant Undersecretary to the Home Office (actually a terrifyingly senior civil servant, but I’m properly prepared for our session this time), get our proposed uniforms redesignated as “protective clothing” (which applies a whole different regulatory brush to them and totally gives me cover for banishing skintight Lycra from the picture forever—it’s a fire risk, don’t you know), then spend an inconclusive and somewhat lachrymose evening with Bob before he ships out to Belize to inspect a ruined temple in the jungle that Angleton vandalized thirty years ago for some reason.

  I am failing to exercise properly, eating badly, and working too hard. I can’t shake the feeling that I’m underqualified for this job and I’ll be found out at any time; also, that it’s not a role I’m temperamentally suited to. On the other hand, with M. and R. tag-teaming me I am keeping back three evenings a week for myself. I continue to play my instrument, periodically misuse Dr. Armstrong’s office as a confessional, and maintain level flight rather than embarking on a downward spiral. Which is about the best I can hope for under the circumstances.

  * * *

  Later in the week and to everybody’s surprise, two new analysts and a receptionist join the team—and then our first two actual card-carrying Home Office superheroes arrive: The Torch and Busy Bee.

  The Torch is nineteen and comes from Macclesfield. He’s about one-ninety centimeters tall, painfully skinny (but stronger than he looks), and not academically inclined. Descended from mill workers: Dad’s a builder, Mum’s a plumber, scraped a couple of GCSE passes, and left school at sixteen to follow Dad into the building trade. Ambition: to work his way all the way to the top, which is defined by the rarefied job description of “skilled bricklayer.” Which, to his credit, he was on course to become—until three months ago, when he discovered that he could light cigarettes by snapping his fingers. Then bonfires. Then convert a fifty-quid B&Q barbecue into a blazing molten Dali sculpture, which is when the Macclesfield Express dubbed him The Torch and offered him a cape and a mask in return for an extremely silly front-page photo op. Prior to us inviting him down to the Big Smoke for an interview, his furthest excursion from home was via Manchester Airport for a package holiday in Marbella when he turned eighteen. The poor lad is utterly out of his depth and painfully naive, but he means well and seems to cotton to the idea of a higher calling in the Police. As long as I assign someone to wipe his nose and ensure he has a fresh change of underwear every morning, he ought to pull through the seething mass of culture shock that is his first exposure to London.

  Busy Bee is going to be more of a handful, but I think I’ve got a grip on where she’s coming from, if not where she’s going. She’s twenty-six and has a file with the Met’s Forward Intelligence Unit that had me arguing back and forth with Jim for days before we agreed to see her. The file was opened in her late teens, back in the Bad Old Days when the Met were Doing Stuff We Don’t Admit We Do Anymore Because It’s Not Allowed. Stuff like Spying On Domestic Terrorists Political Activists. Or, in Bee’s case, teenage feminists.

  Some throwback in FIT was terrified that she might hurl herself under the King’s racehorse at the Grand National—after all, if it could happen in 1913, surely it’s still a clear and present danger? (Votes for Women still being a notoriously controversial political hot potato in the twenty-first century.) Consequently, her file is the Police equivalent of Green Kryptonite, except that she hasn’t actually ever been charged with—much less convicted of—anything. So let’s provisionally re-file her record under Movie Prop Kryptonite and move swiftly on.

  It turns out that our Apis agilis comes from a long line (well, at least one generation) of New Statesman–reading bolshie teacher-activists of the kind the Education Secretary sees under every bed; Dad rose to the dizzy height of town councilor, while Mum continues to teach social sciences at a former polytechnic. Bee got involved in reproductive rights activism in her teens, went on counter-demos against anti-abortion activists, and generally made a bit of a buzz. Then she headed off to university to study political science and economics as a prelude to Taking Over the World, and lowered her sights to taking over one student society at a time (for course credits on the pol. sci. side of her degree).

  That was before she acquired the ability to speed herself up by a factor of ten, which happened ten weeks ago when she darted into a busy road to rescue a runaway two-year-old from a runaway cement mixer, under the unblinking gaze of an experimental hi-def traffic camera. TV news coverage ensued, followed by the usual fifteen minutes of fame (condensed down, in her case, to a ninety-second feel-good slot at the end of the hourly cycle). She can only do it as long as she can hold her breath—she can’t absorb oxygen or discharge carbon dioxide from the linings of her lungs while in super-speed mode—but what she can accomplish in that time is impressive. During our skills matrix review Ramona added “Can administer wedgies at a rate of five supervillains per second” to the checklist. I was tempted to leave it in, despite the HomeSec’s notoriously unpredictable sense of humor—and though I cut it in the end, it’s not far from the forefront of my thinking about how we could deploy her. Also, she’s cute (in a petite black-with-yellow-stripes-and-dimples sort of way).

  All we need is for our next pair of candidates to clear the Enhanced CRB checks and we might even be able to start training them for deployment.

  * * *

  One afternoon, I’m in a meeting with Jim and the analysts (now augmented by Gillian and Karim, two new transfers from the Laundry) when the Met ECC phones me to pass on the unwelcome news that the elusive Professor Freudstein has struck again.

  Ironically, it happens while we’re sitting around a table brainstorming possible approaches to the nascent Mad Scientist Menace. Freudstein—and our signal lack of success in getting a lead on him, not to mention his stolen forty million pounds and rare musical score collection—is a persistent irritant, one of a growing list of problems that are on our collective to-do list, along with the likes of the Mandate. We’ll get around to them just as soon as the agency is fully staffed and ready to move from setup to active operations, honest. Until then, all we can really do is map out the beat we’re going to have to patrol.

  For his part, Jim is convinced that the MSM is real: “Freudstein looks like a fairly plausible type specimen,” he explains, “and that’s disturbing, because the thing about criminals of a given type is that for every one we know about, there are usually four more we don’t. Also, we haven’t managed to collar him yet. Which is not a good sign.”

  “Yes, but our prior probabilities are—” I stop dead, realizing there’s stuff I can’t talk about with Jim. Sam and Nick are cleared. Gillian and Karim, coming from the Laundry, are also cleared: I could talk to them about Ellis Billington and JENNIFER MORGUE if necessary. But while Jim is cleared for joint operations that require police liaison, I’m not inclined to be loose-lipped about other operations around him as long as the SA isn’t certain he’s on the up-and-up. Even operations that a
re over and dead and buried. (Anyway, Billington wasn’t exactly a Mad Scientist. Mad Businessman, maybe, but Scientist? I’m not so sure.) I clear my throat, then hesitantly finish my sentence with “—unclear.”

  “Not really!” Gillian volunteers brightly. “We’ve seen several three-sigma instances of intelligence enhancement in the past few months. For example there’s Brainbox, who aced Brain of Britain last month and maxed out on Mensa’s IQ test. There may be many more low-grade examples, but they don’t stick out like a sore thumb. Intelligence isn’t like flight or pyrokinesis—it’s something all of us have.”

  “Anyway, you don’t have to be terribly intelligent to complete a PhD,” Karim grumps. “You just need to be stupidly persistent. If anything, being too smart gets in the way—”

  “How would you proactively identify a Mad Scientist, anyway?” asks Sam, dragging the round-table back on-topic before Karim starts fulminating about the state of his student loans.

  Jim responds. “Let’s see. Traditional Mad Scientists aren’t team players, are they? And science is very much a team sport, this century. You could probably go some way towards narrowing the field by looking for sudden resignations from research groups or by hunting for researchers who’ve suddenly stopped publishing.” He makes it sound so easy. “Unfortunately the lead time on publishing a peer-reviewed paper is months to years, so there’s a lot of lag in the system.” He continues to undermine his own case: “And researchers quit for any number of reasons. They have babies, or they take a highly paid job offer from a bank, or they just get bored and take up martial arts. That happened to one really famous mathematician: these days she’s the world’s third-ranking female cage fighter.”