Oddjobs 2: This Time It's Personnel

by Heide Goody

  “I’ve got a family-sized bucket for you,” said Nina, pointing back at the crane bucket. “First we’ve got to find a book and Vivian.”

  “Mrs G?” said the samakha. “That her there?”

  It damn well was.

  Vivian was running at them, spritely for such an old biddy, a bunch of papers clutched in her hand.

  “We are leaving, Miss Seth!” she shouted. “Now!”

  Morag Junior had sat with only silence for company for several minutes. Weird light still played around the roof of Mammon-Mammonson Investments. Steve’s voice was gone from the headset. The line to Nina was still open but there had been only interference and muffled voices. Suddenly, there was a sharp burst of static.

  “–s up,” said Nina.

  “Come again?” said Junior.

  “Kxxxk – take us up.”

  “Now?”

  “Now!” said Nina.

  Junior pulled the joystick to retract the line.

  “Scream if you want to go faster,” she said.

  “Kxxx –” said Nina.

  Rod wished he understood Venislarn a little better – no, a heck of a lot better – because something had changed between the arguing Mammonites and priests of Nystar. As he climbed the shaking slope to the surface he noted a definite shift in tone in the blobby monsters’ chanting. Had it stopped being too early? Was it now okay for the Mammonites to greet their dear old mama?

  He looked down over the edge.

  The crane bucket was swinging as it came up, three or possibly four figures squeezed into it. Yoth Mammon, that great wall-to-wall orifice, was powering up the shaft only just below them.

  Vivian saw her error as they drew level with where the word mage had fallen. Paper fluttered under the edge of his robes and at least one piece was stuck to the wall by the constant updraft.

  “Take this,” she said to Nina and passed her the book pages.

  She gripped the supporting chains above her and pulled herself up to the rim of the bucket.

  “What are you doing?” said Nina.

  “I’ve left some pages behind.”

  Nina shook her head. “Vivian. You’ll never jump that.”

  Nina was wrong, as she often was. The bucket was swinging in a shifting ellipse.

  “It’ll bring me close enough in a minute. It’s like a Spirograph. It will eventually bring me round to…”

  Vivian levered herself up, crouched unsupported on the lip for a second and leapt. It was a good leap. She landed solidly on the path – stumbled, yes, and cut herself on the rocks, yes, but landed solidly.

  She ran back down the half turn to the word mage.

  Nina was shouting. Vivian ignored her.

  Nina turned to the samakha and the woman.

  “What the hell’s a Spirograph?”

  Kathy discovered that offices were generally lacking in sledgehammers and sledgehammer-like objects. Given the situation, she considered this a gross oversight on the part of office furnishers everywhere.

  Thirty seconds into the search, she had found a long-armed stapler and Cameron had located a printer. Neither seemed wholly suitable for the job.

  A jeer went up from the Mammonites at the pit’s edge. She looked back.

  A pair of Mammonites had hauled Rod from the path and held him pinned, in a double armlock.

  Vivian grabbed at the wind-tossed pages. Theoretically, any selection of multiple pages from the Big Bloody Book had the capacity to contain infinite knowledge, to allow those with ability to unlock forbidden doors and loose fresh terrors. She cast about for stray pages and prepared to run.

  Fingers closed around her ankle. It was the Carcosan word mage, bent horribly in two but not yet dead. Amber eyes beneath paper-white lids blinked at her. He mouthed something.

  Vivian had no time for this but a whisper of his words reached her ears.

  “Tei gharri cor ap Shallas.”

  She shook her head at such nonsense.

  “Kash ka…” he said and attempted a nod.

  Nonsense, she told herself. The nonsense product of a dying mind.

  The crane bucket was a distance above her now. Yoth Mammon was below her, much closer now, and ascending at speed. Vivian shook herself free of the word mage’s weak grip and ran.

  Nina saw Vivian running. She saw the goddess rising.

  “She’s not going to make it,” she said.

  She looked up at the distance they still had to go.

  “We’re not going to make it.”

  “I thought you were rescuing us, blood,” said Pupfish.

  She gave him a blast of her stone-cold bitch look.

  “Lighter,” she said to Allana.

  The woman was slow in retrieving it from her purse. Nina snatched it from her and lit it beneath the bound pages of the Big Bloody Book.

  “Do you know what happens when you set fire to a book with an infinite number of pages?” she said as it began to catch alight.

  “What?” said Allana.

  Nina shrugged. “Let’s find out.”

  She held on as long as she dared – the flames turning from orange to yellow to blue-white – and then dropped it over the side. By the time it entered Yoth Mammon’s gaping piehole, the book, no bigger than a glossy magazine, had become a fireball of searing intensity.

  Pupfish was awestruck. “You – ggh! – would try to kill a god? Kos-kho bhul!”

  “Just give her a little heartburn,” said Nina. She put her phone to her ear. “Morag, we need to swing over and pick up Vivian.”

  Kathy shouted to the Mammonites who held Rod.

  “Let him go!”

  They didn’t comply. They didn’t argue back. It was worse than that; they simply ignored her.

  “Hey!” she yelled. “Let him go or Yoth Mammon gets trapped in leng-space forever.”

  They looked at her then but with no great urgency.

  “What are you going to do?” called Xerxes Mammon-Mammonson. “Threaten us with a stapler and a printer?”

  “Yeah!” said Cameron. “You’d better adn-bhul believe it.”

  Xerxes shook his head, bored. “Kill them,” he said simply.

  Three Mammonite executives began circling the pit to come at them.

  “Do it!” yelled Rod. “Close it!”

  Kathy’s eyes flicked to the crane bucket. It was coming up now. Not far to the surface.

  Morag Junior watched the crane readouts.

  The bucket was nearly back up to the height at which Nina had first climbed aboard. Only a few seconds until it was clear.

  The phone line was a squall of noise and static that might once have been speech.

  Yoth Mammon screamed as she climbed. Maybe it was excitement. Maybe it was anger. Maybe it had something to do with the sun-bright fireball she appeared to be gargling. Anger, excitement or pain, it was being translated into earth-shaking spasms that sent those in the world above stumbling.

  Kathy stepped back. The Mammonite running at her tripped and fell aside. Cameron swung his printer and clouted another one on the side of the head.

  “Now, Kathy!” yelled Rod.

  The bucket wasn’t up yet. It wasn’t quite through.

  Yoth Mammon ripped apart the spiral path as she wriggled past. Priests of Nystar and Mammonites fell together, crying out to their goddess.

  Rod wrestled one arm free and punched his other captor.

  “Now!”

  The fallen Mammonite had found its feet. Kathy raised the long-armed stapler over her head and hammered it into the nearest symbol of the inner ring. The symbol cracked apart.

  Nina fell onto broken ground. Oofing and eeking, Pupfish and Allana landed with her. The world had fallen silent. No roaring deities. No chanting blob-priests. No earthquake rumbles. She stood in the centre of a circle of ruined mosaic on a floor that was otherwise complete and whole. The gateway to leng-space was gone.

  Above her, the crane bucket rose onwards, its bottom an open circle, sliced away by
the closing gate. She immediately inspected her shoes and saw that a few millimetres had been shaved off the soles.

  “Too close,” she said.

  Any closer and she’d have lost precious centimetres of her own foot. And she was short enough as it was.

  But it was done. The ritual had failed. Against all odds, the city was saved. Kathy Kaur, her arm wet with blood, stood with Cameron Barnes at the edge of the circle. They were inexplicably armed with a stapler and a printer. Rod had backed off some distance from the nine remaining Mammonites. Xerxes Mammon-Mammonson, the boss, stared in disbelief at the ruin of his plan.

  Pupfish, Allana, Kathy, Cameron, Rod, Mammonites. She whirled on the spot.

  “Where’s Vivian?”

  No one piped up. There was no “here I am.”

  “Where’s Vivian?” she demanded, angrily.

  “She was running,” said Cameron which was no answer at all.

  “I had to...” said Kathy which was even less.

  Nina dropped to her knees and brushed broken mosaic aside and, when pieces didn’t come, she pulled at the floor. But it was just stone and concrete. Leng was somewhere else entirely now.

  Rod put a hand under her arm and lifted her.

  “I told Kathy to do it,” he said.

  A great and terrible emotion bubbled up inside Nina. She abruptly wanted to hurt and hold Rod at the same time and was instead caught in a numb nowhere in between.

  Xerxes Mammon-Mammonson swung a finger at all of them.

  “You have transgressed,” he said. “The laws you have broken, the treaties you have violated. Never, in all history, has a legitimate business enterprise been treated so unfairly, so unjustly.”

  Nina felt Rod slowly guiding her back to where Kathy and Cameron stood. Pupfish and Allana had already hurried for cover. Nine Mammonites, all of them either already armed or now drawing their impractical but deadly blades, were ranged before them.

  “Stock theft,” said Xerxes, furious. “Capital destruction. Material damage. Misuse of office equipment.”

  “We submit to the judgement of the Venislarn court,” said Rod. “There will be restitution.”

  Xerxes shook his head, advancing.

  “The accounts have been tallied. We know what we’re owed.”

  Five humans and a samakha and barely a weapon between them. The Mammonites drew in.

  “This will not be over quickly,” said Xerxes. There was a hungry set to his mouth and a manic glitter in his inhuman eyes.

  “When I attack,” Rod whispered to Nina, “you run for that fire exit.”

  “Attack with what?” she whispered back.

  “I’ve got a penknife somewhere.”

  “A penknife? Don’t be a cretin,” she said, knowing that it was the best of all the bloody stupid things they could do right now.

  Morag Senior slammed through a door and into a huge office space that looked as if it had just been visited by a small but persistent tornado.

  “Stop!” she shouted.

  The Mammonites, in their dirt-smeared suits, with their knives out, turned to look at her. Before any of them could speak, she held up the sheet of paper she had just run across town with.

  “This is an order from Yo-Morgantus, prince of Venislarn, ruler absolute of this city and all of its residents, human and non-human.”

  They didn’t run over and stab her at once so that was a good start.

  “It commands Mammon-Mammonson Investments and all its senior officers to cease and desist in any current attempts to summon Yoth Mammon, the corruptor, the defiler of souls, the dredger in the lake of desires, back to this world, schluri’o bento frei. It also commands Mammon-Mammonson Investments to surrender into the authority of the consular mission to the Venislarn any human beings it is holding, living or dead, as well as any material goods that they require for current or future criminal investigations into the senior officers or the company entire.”

  “She’s going to get murdered,” Rod whispered to Nina.

  “No, wait,” said Nina. “This actually might work.”

  Xerxes walked towards Morag. Rod could see the nervousness in Morag’s stance.

  “Are you sure?” he said.

  “Furthermore,” said Morag, “the consular mission staff are not to be hindered, delayed or harmed in the execution of their duty. The penalty for non-compliance will be the total and immediate eradication of the Mammonite species from their enclave in Dickens Heath and anywhere else they might be found in Lord Morgantus’s domain.”

  “Let me see that,” said Xerxes and held out his hand.

  Morag edged forward and presented the sheet to him.

  He read it slowly, nodding occasionally. He then folded it carefully and tucked it inside his jacket.

  “Everything appears to be in order,” he said.

  Rod waited. Xerxes looked round at first his board of directors and then at the humans.

  “You are free to go.”

  Friday

  There was no body to bury and there was no family to inform. There would be a stone on a crematorium wall at some point and certainly there would be reminiscences and drinks in the pub even though Vivian did not approve of drinking. There would be a lot of things that Vivian did not approve of that she wouldn’t be around to disapprove of anymore and they would have to do a lot of disapproving on her behalf. But, for now, there was a quiet moment in the response team office and cheap wine in plastic cups.

  The response team operated a hot-desking policy. This tended to mean that every person’s crap didn’t just occupy one desk but any desk they had ever sat at. However, Vivian’s desk was Vivian’s desk and no one dared hot-desk it and that was the way it was going to stay for a long time yet.

  Rod raised a cup to the labelled filing trays and the savagely ordered desk tidy, to the neatly aligned computer and keyboard, to the drinks coaster, and to the tub of gloopy keyboard cleaner. There was no indication that a real and fallible human being had ever worked there and that was how Vivian would have wanted it.

  “I have no mouth,” he said.

  “And I must scream,” the others replied and drank and then went about the business of the day.

  Kathy looked across the desk at Vaughn Sitterson.

  He seemed intent on the computer screen before him. No matter how she smiled or waggled her eyebrows at him, he didn’t seem capable of acknowledging her presence. Did he do this to everyone? Had he forgotten she was there?

  “Excuse me,” she said.

  “Yes?”

  “Is there some doubt about my appointment?”

  “Oh, no. Not at all, Dr Kaur,” said Vaughn, still utterly avoiding looking at her. “Mr Barnes was very clear on the matter and I both respect and agree with Mrs Grey’s decision. Her final decision.”

  “Good, so…”

  Vaughn swivelled his chair and gazed out of the window.

  “The tech support job is yours if you want it.”

  “Thank you, sir,” she said and made to stand.

  “But,” said Vaughn, “with the very unfortunate death of Mrs Grey, we do have two vacancies to fill…”

  Morag Senior met Cameron at New Street station to see him off.

  He had spent his final night in the city in his hotel. After the events of the day before, she didn’t have the energy or emotional capacity to spend time catching up in the evening and he hadn’t asked, but she came to the station to see him off.

  “You’ll have to put up with the Edinburgh job for a while yet,” she said as they waited for his train to come up on the departures board.

  “Do you miss the old town?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “I do.”

  “Bannerman will no doubt be asking after you.”

  “And how is chief Bannerman?”

  Cameron shrugged. “He always had a soft spot for you. Never had one for me.”

  He tossed his fringe out of his eyes. There was a dark red mark near his temple but he’d ot
herwise survived his visit to Birmingham unscathed.

  “Ah, before I forget,” said Senior. She took the shodu-bon claim marker pendant from her pocket and put it in his hand.

  “It was a present for you,” he said.

  “Ah, well. Some girls like diamonds. Some like gold. Very few like dried Venislarn mucous. Besides, it was a present to you first.”

  He pulled an uncomfortable expression. “I really hadn’t planned to see her again,” he said.

  “So, this thing with you and – Chagulameya, was it? – it was a serious thing?”

  “It perhaps was,” he said, “but that kind of relationship is hard to maintain. I’m in Britain, she’s in the South Pacific. I work for the consular mission, she’s…”

  “A fucking huge sea slug from another world, yeah,” said Junior with unfiltered sarcasm. “It’s Romeo and Juliet all over again, isn’t it?”

  His expression stiffened a degree.

  “We’re not all the same, are we?” he said. “The heart wants what the heart wants. And, you know, as they say, yofehngeta muesulma-dia bheros chinn-ha.” He gave her a raffish grin.

  “No, Cameron,” she replied. “No one says that. Ever.”

  She turned and walked to the exit.

  Mrs Cook-Mammonson, headteacher at the Thatcher Academy, was partway through her assembly address to the year sevens when she saw that a student in one of the middle rows had stood up.

  After the unwanted intrusion on school grounds and the assault on her person by that genetically deficient runt, Nina Seth, Mrs Cook-Mammonson had come into school this morning with a bloody nose and the script for a powerful assembly about perseverance in the face of adversity under her strong and stable leadership.

  She had barely warmed to her theme and this child had stood up. It was Yang Mammon-Mammonson.

  “Sit down,” said Cook-Mammonson but the girl was walking up the aisle to the front, a tablet in her hand. “Return to your seat at once.”

  Yang did not slow, did not deviate. She came to front and presented her tablet to the headteacher. Yang’s score on the screen was nine point eight.