The Annihilation Score

by Charles Stross

  “Don’t fight,” Bee pants in my ear. There’s a huge weight on my back, and after a moment I realize it’s Captain Mahvelous. I’m being sat on by my own minion. Wonderful.

  “Mhari—”

  “Here, Mo.” She jumps across fallen chairs and lands beside me, the two halves of the violin case in her hands. “Can you put it in—”

  “Too strong,” I gasp. “Won’t hold it. Also—” I nod towards the gate.

  “Well, all the same—” Mhari cringes back from the fiddle, which is trying to poke her. “Who can—”

  “Coming!” calls Ramona. “Wait for me!” The whine of her wheelchair sets my teeth on edge like a dentist’s drill as she rises and flies above the field of bodies. For a moment the glamour slips and I see it as it is, and wish I hadn’t: those aren’t wheels, and her chariot is disturbingly alive. But then it descends to the stage and I blink and it’s a wheelchair again.

  ***You can’t stop me!*** Lecter roars. I try to let go again, but all that happens is my hands twitch helplessly.

  “Wrong.” Ramona throws something to Mhari. “Warded gloves. Bee, go and help Lollipop and Torch. Eric, see if you can work that thing out of her hands; Mhari, hold the case while Eric closes it, then shove it over here while I—”

  ***Slaves! To me!***

  I’ve been dreading this moment. All around us, the possessed are rising—those who haven’t already been life-drained by Lecter. But they’re not going to human-wave us: rather, they’re bunching up, opening corridors to the back of the floor where I see other bodies with green-glowing eyes that almost match the luminosity of their high-vis vests. Of course: Lecter’s had over an hour to work on Laura’s people, hasn’t he?

  “Get off me,” I gasp.

  “Soz, not going to happen until you let go, boss.” Some unseen force tugs at my fingers as Eric—Captain Mahvelous—shifts his weight. My ribs creak. Then suddenly my fingertips close on air. “Great! Is it in—”

  There’s a loud clatter as the bone violin and its bow skitter into the case that Mhari holds warily at arm’s length. She slams it shut, then fumbles the catches closed. “In the bag.” Mhari sounds exhausted. “You can let her up now. Sorry, Mo.” She turns and shoves the case across the stage. I can still feel Lecter in my head, buzzing furiously, but he’s curiously muffled.

  Eric rolls off me and apologetically produces a handcuff key. I raise my wrists. “Jesus, boss, what happened to your hands?” he asks.

  I look past his shoulder as he unlocks the cuffs. “Behind you!”

  Because I’m watching the approaching cops with the green-glowing eyes and their raised batons, I am looking away at the moment when Ramona runs her chair at the violin case and sends it skidding across the stage and through the gate to Carcosa. Even though I know it’s for the best, the memory of losing my instrument forever fills me with an unrelieved sense of gray anguish even now. Decades ago I read The Lord of the Rings; I believe Tolkien understood something of that sense of loss, from his description of the ringbearer’s torment at the edge of the Crack of Doom. It’s the anguish born of losing a part of your body, or a chunk of your soul, and like all amputations it is best for the subject not to watch it with their eyes open. I don’t see the violin case skitter across the threshold, but I feel it, a bone-deep ache in my hands and heart that spreads rapidly.

  ***Come back!*** The voice is muffled but I can still hear him, from a great distance.

  The officers are closing in. There are at least half a dozen of them in crowd-control gear; behind them, another four uniforms, Laura Stanwick among them. The glowing eyes—is that my perception of them? Or is this something else? They move too normally, too fluidly, to be truly possessed, but—

  “You idiot,” Stanwick swears, glaring at me. “You had just one job and you still managed to make a balls-up of it.”

  “Was that part of your so-called job?” I ask, waving a bloody thumb behind me at the rippling portal. “Because—”

  “You’re under arrest,” she tells me, ignoring the gate floating at the back of the stage. It’s as if she can’t see it. And yes, her eyes are faintly luminous: What’s gotten to her? Backwash from the payload she tried to install in everyone? “We’ll work out the charges later, but disobeying orders issued under a CCA note will do for starters. Also, destruction of—”

  ***Soon.***

  My skin crawls as I hear Lecter’s call in the distance, and an answering echo. Something is approaching the other side of the gate: I can feel it. So, from their behavior, do the rest of my team—but Stanwick and her people seem blind to the sense of immanent dread. “Close the fucking gate,” I call, not caring who responds. “Close it down now.”

  Mhari: “On it—”

  “Not yet,” an amplified voice booms out. A moment later, the floor beneath me vibrates. I register shock on Stanwick’s face for a split instant before I look round and see Officer Friendly standing before the gate. In the ghostly moonlight streaming through the portal the blue strobe light on top of his helmet looks almost washed out, a flickering sapphire of doubt against the forces of night. He’s holding a tube of some kind in one hand: I recognize it just as he throws it through the gate, rippling pages unfurling and flapping. “Close it now!” he booms, as I feel something lurch closer, the focus of a malevolence a thousand times vaster than Lecter searching for—

  Mhari throws something small and dense at the wall of light. “Down!” she shouts, taking a dive towards the floor at one side. I look away and begin to raise my arms to shield my face, then the high-end banishment ward hits the gate and slices it to shreds, severing my final link with my instrument.

  And that’s all I remember.

  * * *

  “So,” asks the Senior Auditor, “what happened next?”

  We’re in his office. He’s seated behind his desk, chair reclined, a half-full crystal tumbler of smoky amber anesthesia sitting to hand. I’m standing with my back to him, in front of the curtained window, inspecting the weave of the fabric: an expensive, heavy brocade, quite capable of blacking out whatever lies beyond. I’m wearing a cardigan over a baggy dress I can put on and take off without using my fingertips—I’m still on sick leave.

  “I woke up in hospital. Unlike many others.” I shove my gloved hands deeper into my dress’s pockets. “Slept again. Woke up once for Bob, told him to take the damned cat. Another time, Jim was there. He wanted to apologize. Said he didn’t know about the Freudstein conspiracy. Did you know about him?”

  “Let’s keep to your story for now.” He’s gentle but ruthless. “What else?”

  “Well. After three days they let Mhari in to brief me. Or maybe she just walked past the nursing station: it’s hard to keep her out of somewhere. She told me about Jim’s call. She told me what Jim told her, about Assistant Commissioner Stanwick’s operation—”

  “Ex–Assistant Commissioner Stanwick,” he interrupts. “I’m sorry, please continue.”

  “Operation Freudstein was the Met’s official undercover operation to justify their acquisition of unlimited powers under the Civil Contingencies Act for policing supernormal powers. Coordinating with like-minded chief constables in other forces, with a nod and a wink from the Home Office, although I think the HomeSec was careful to ensure that she wasn’t personally briefed on exactly what they were doing. We were set up to fail, thereby demonstrating that an agency with our background couldn’t possibly do the job. Incidentally, if I were you, I’d be really worried about that. Someone in HMG really doesn’t love us and want us to be happy—”

  I take a deep breath, then turn round and stare at Dr. Armstrong. He nods mildly, looking utterly unperturbed.

  “I lost an irreplaceable asset—the violin,” I remind him. I wish he’d be angry, so I could be angry right back at him. “I trusted a man who was planted on me as a spy.” And I nearly allowed it to become a personal betrayal:
but the SA doesn’t need to know about that side of things. “I failed to stop Stanwick subverting the geas in my oath of office, and as a result, I failed to prevent a horrific civilian mass fatality—” The death toll at the Royal Albert Hall was lower than I feared at the time, but still well over two thousand. It made news headlines around the world: blaming it on a deranged supervillain seems somehow inadequate. National trauma ensued: there’s popular support for Parliament banning all superpowers, and who could blame them? Even if we know it’s really not possible, any more than a law banning drowning would prevent riptides. “The spin-out organization I set up is almost certainly going to be wound up, or in-sourced within the Met as part of the Specialist Operations Directorate, once they finish cleaning house. Oh, and if I’m really lucky, I may regain enough sensation in my fingertips to play the violin again some day.” I allow some tension to creep into my voice as I get to that part. My fingers still ache dully, four weeks later: my pain control consultant is gradually tapering off the opiates.

  “Sit down, please, Dr. O’Brien.” He gestures at the padded armchair alongside the desk. “What do you expect me to say?”

  “I expect you to say you’re sorry,” I say coldly.

  “Well, yes, and you may take that as a given.” He glances away, as if embarrassed. I take that as my cue to sit down. “Do you understand why—”

  “Yes.”

  “But you—”

  “You knew what it would do to me.” He knows about my trust issues. He knows what happened last time someone used me as bait in a trap. Chewed up and spat out, damaged goods. “I know you thought the ends justified the means in this case, Michael. And I can’t refute your case. That a major ministry was trying to colonize our turf, using recklessly inappropriate methods. That a very senior police officer was, with approval from the top table, running a rogue paranormal operation. That they’d gotten delusions of omniscience and decided that their ends justified their chosen means, regardless of collateral damage, including nearly summoning the King in Yellow. Oh, and they were working with a senior police liaison organization known for having employed covert intelligence assets to infiltrate other groups—admittedly this was at a rather higher level than the usual run of the mill Forward Intelligence Team asset. And Jim wasn’t exactly hiding the fact that he was a cop, was he? Nevertheless.”

  I chew my lower lip as he looks at me. The next sentence will be the hardest.

  “I want to tender my resignation,” I say, very careful to keep my voice as even as possible. “Effective immediately.” Then I cross my arms and wait.

  “Um.” Dr. Armstrong slides his half-moon glasses off and fumbles on his desk for a cloth. “Excuse me?”

  “I want to quit,” I explain. “It’s too much. I can’t. Can’t do it. Anymore.” My throat doesn’t want to obey me. “Every time I go back and try harder it gets worse. It’s eaten my life and my friends and my marriage and my hands. And I’m not making things any better.” I sniff. I am determined not to cry, but my control is wearing thin.

  The SA finishes polishing his glasses and puts them back on, then peers at me over their rims. “Have you ever had a nervous breakdown before, Mo?”

  “I have never—!”

  “No? I should think not.” He glances at a paper file on his blotter, then reaches into a recess in his desk and pulls out a bottle and an empty glass. “Will you at least join me in a glass?”

  “I—I—” I stare at the bottle. I don’t know what to say, but I shudder violently, and he seems to mistake it for a nod.

  “You’ve been driving towards the precipice for the past eighteen months,” he says as matter-of-factly as if he’s discussing the weather, while he pours me a glass of Laphroaig. “To be honest I wasn’t sure you’d make it this far: you’ve been burning the candle at both ends for too long.” He nudges the tumbler towards me. It’s so full it nearly slops over. “Cheers.”

  “Cheers—” The whisky is a decent enough single malt, but my sinuses are so clogged with unshed tears that all I can taste is fire water and wood smoke. “What?”

  “Nervous breakdowns,” he says, very seriously, “have a lot in common with acute PTSD. You’ve been courting it for a while: relationship trouble, overwork, burn-out, sleep deprivation, acute stress, and the added burden of”—he swallows—“carrying the white instrument. That’s how almost all of us get out of it, incidentally: the violin bleeds you until you can’t handle it anymore. Got out of it, I should say.”

  “But it’s gone!” I raise my voice. “I lost it!”

  “No, Dr. O’Brien, your team made a joint determination that it had become dangerously unstable and decommissioned it before it could kill any more civilians. It nearly killed you, in case you’ve forgotten? It overpowered you, the second-longest standing bearer, the only one to have custody of it during the active conjunction of CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN.”

  “Who was the longest-standing bearer?” I ask before I can stifle my morbid curiosity. “And what happened to him or her?”

  “Judy Carroll carried the violin for nine years, back in the 1980s and early 1990s.” I nearly spit single malt across the room: Grandmotherly Dr. Carroll, in her twinset and pearls? “Back before the unfortunate incident at Dansey House she and I were discussing what to do with the instrument when you could no longer carry it. We had already determined that there were no suitable candidate successors; I believe our biggest dilemma was how to decommission it safely, without provoking an incident along the lines that eventuated at the Albert Hall.”

  “Well.” I swallow. “I still want to resign.”

  “I know you do.” Dr. Armstrong sips his whisky and frowns at some passing thought as he watches me. “Naturally enough: you feel betrayed and let down right now. And I can’t say you’re unjustified. You’re right about your organization, by the way: I gather they’re already opening up a slot on the org chart at the Yard, tentatively labelled SCO20—serious paranormal crime. They’ll purge the management team except for Jim Grey, and keep the rank and file on as cadre for the new unit. But that need not concern you.”

  “The HomeSec probably wants my head on a plate,” I mumble.

  “She’s not getting it.” He leans forward. “Oh, she may have to receive your written pro forma resignation, but that’s not the same at all.”

  “I told you, I want to quit.”

  “Yes well, we can’t always get what we want, can we, Mo?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It’s supposed to mean that we owe you a lengthy stretch of sick leave while you get your head back together. We also owe you a promotion and a performance bonus, or as much of one as we can scrape together—this isn’t the private sector, alas, or you’d be down at Earl’s Court pricing up your next luxury yacht. And if it will set your mind at ease, we won’t be putting you back into field operations as Agent CANDID, or anything remotely similar. There’s a statute of limitations on field ops, and eight years of carrying the bone violin means you’re fully paid up: after you come back, you won’t be punching tentacle monsters anymore.

  “But that doesn’t mean the organization is through with you. Quite the contrary, in fact.” His smile is avuncular, warm, friendly, and utterly terrifying. “Your attempt to resign while in the grip of an acute stress reaction is noted and declined. Go home, Mo. Play with the cat, write up your report, take a break. Now that the white violin is out of the picture, why don’t you see if you can sort things out with your husband? Take a month; take two.

  “But sooner or later you’ll feel better, and when that happens, you should drop in and see me. There are a lot of things we need to talk about, once you’ve calmed down and regained your center. For one thing, Judith’s seat on the Board of Auditors is waiting for you. And for another, you know what they say about the traditional reward for a job well done . . .”

  * Lecter is not my violin’s
true name. I am not going to tell you its true name, because the aphorism “true names have power,” while technically correct, is wildly misleading, and not in a good way. In the case of my violin, Lecter becomes aware of everyone who knows its true name, and sometimes takes an interest. And you really do not want Lecter to take an interest in you.

  * Yes, there will be an exam afterwards.

  * The UK rates a BLUE HADES embassy by virtue of historic precedent; having once been the world’s pre-eminent naval power, we are now the subject of their ongoing interest. And wish we weren’t.

  * Not that I’m wearing one. Little Ms. Dowdy, like I said.

  * Laundry warrant cards have this power: in addition to identifying the holder, they carry a powerful geas that enables the holder—as long as they’re on official business—to convince any other servant of Her Majesty’s Government that you’re a superior.†

  † Don’t try this on the Prime Minister. Or the Queen.

  * Actually, such tabloid caricatures are rather poor representations of the reality; they’re all charming, personable, extremely sharp individuals who are terrifyingly well-informed about the workings of their departments. You don’t get to the top table of a government—any government—without being an overachiever. This doesn’t mean I’d vote (or not vote) for them; as ministers it’s their duty to toe the line with respect to the governing party’s policy platform, and I’m not the kind of girl who’ll vote for a friendly dude I’d like to share a beer with if I happen to suspect that he’d quite like to invade Poland. But I find it faintly reassuring to confirm that, however misguided I might privately think some of our government’s policies might be, at least they are being executed with enthusiasm and zeal by first-class overachievers. Because it beats the alternative.