The Annihilation Score (Laundry Files)

by Charles Stross

  For her part, Ramona arrives by elevator because that’s how she rolls these days. She rides in a motorized wheelchair, using a rug or a long skirt to hide her deformed lower limbs. Her glamour is more effective by far than my makeup or Mhari’s PHANG-enhanced appearance, but she makes up for it by being disarmingly friendly and charming as well as supernaturally pretty. At first Mhari circles her like a suspicious cat, tail raised and bristling, unsure whether to attack or roll over, but Ramona can deal with Mhari in her sleep. I put Ramona in charge of Human Resources, with a remit to ride herd on Emma MacDougal’s more madcap misapprehensions about the personnel requirements of the Transhuman Policy Coordination Unit. It works swimmingly, and by Thursday M. and R. are practically joined at the hip, drawing up a skills matrix for evaluating the core competencies of candidates for the embryonic Transhuman Law Enforcement Assistance Force.* On Friday I come in to find them preparing briefings for freelance comic scriptwriters – to help us to flesh out the image of the Home Office superteam in the public eye – and I mentally pat myself on the back. Teamwork: we have it.

  Once I’ve given my statements and written up all the reports arising from the British Library business, it’s back to the real job. With people and processes covered, I’m free to focus on long-range policy and work out how to bluff my way through the executive vision thing. Which is as it should be.

  I steal an hour a day to go down to the basement storeroom, hang out a DO NOT DISTURB sign, lock the door securely, and tune up my violin. Practice: we need it. Initially Lecter sulks. He’s baffled and frustrated by my failure to feed him my husband’s soul, and resentful at my recent neglect of his needs. At first his timbre is lifeless and rough. But the exigencies of practice slowly reach him, and after an hour or so the old magic flows. So does blood from the ears of the security guard when he hears something and comes to listen through the door; so on subsequent practices I not only lock the basement storeroom, but have his replacement wedge the fire door giving access to the basement stairwell shut. I’m much less likely to die in a fire down there than I am to suck the soul from an unwitting intruder. As for the guard, I make sure to send him a card in hospital.

  I work late most evenings, doing my reading and writing up reports to a background of BBC Radio 3 or Classic FM on a portable radio I brought into my office. It’s my one guilty pleasure: I turn it on only after everyone else has left. When I go home I sleep in my own bed. There are no recurrences of the horrid dancing dreams, much less of sight-reading the score from “Cassilda’s Song.” (I don’t even know if it’s a real part of the missing score: Mhari’s probing determines that the BL held the only known copy of The King in Yellow, which has never had an actual no-shit performance in public and was written in the 1920s by an over-impressionable disciple of Schoenberg’s, Austin Osman Spare, who ended up in Broadmoor Hospital.)

  Spooky takes to waking me in the morning by wrapping herself, purring, around my head: she sleeps cuddled up against my side and sits in my lap when I check my email on the sofa after dinner. This would be wonderfully endearing if she wasn’t also prone to waking up howling in the middle of the night and running lengths of the house. She also stalks my toes if I accidentally stick them out from under the duvet, and yells at me when the litter tray isn’t cleaned to her scrupulous standards. Endearing, my ass.

  Bob emails me once a day, from a secure terminal. I email him back. Sweet nothings, miss you, wish you were here. We kick the can down the road: I can’t be sure, but I’m very much afraid it’s a highway, destination signposted to nowhere.

  On Wednesday morning I get dragged over to the Home Office for a much less intimidating meeting, chaired by an Undersecretary and his staff. They go over my strategy proposal point by point, ironing out any ambiguities and nailing down assumptions. We spend a couple of hours on it and part amicably. I go over to the New Annex, which is now mostly up and running again, and attend the weekly Special Projects briefing. SpecProj is a security-cleared meet-and-greet intended to ensure that everyone with a stake in one or another of our R&D streams is at least vaguely aware of what else is going on – at least, about the stuff they’re cleared for that they might need to use. We hear a report from the subcommittee on occult artifacts (such as Lecter); also a report on capabilities and threat postures presented by foreign government OCCINT agencies, a backgrounder on the latest updates to the Benthic Treaties (as signed by the various ambassadors last Friday, although they’ve been in the works for years), and finally a presentation on the population dynamics of superpower distribution.

  “The growth curve is showing signs of slackening, as of last week,” says the earnest young man from Epidemiology. “It’s still too early to be sure – the error bars are quite wide – but we are reasonably optimistic that by this time next month we’ll be able to plot a curve and see where things are going to within a five percent confidence interval. We’re also refining the power distribution curve. Stripping out the hard stats: if the growth curve is the sigmoid we think we’re looking at, then when it levels off, about one person per million in the general population will have high-level superpowers, five-sigma stuff. The main body of the normal distribution, one sigma either side of the norm, is one in a thousand, and we can’t detect anything more than a single sigma to the left of the median.”

  There are some dismayed noises when the audience realizes the implication – sixty thousand people in the UK can expect to receive “normal” levels of superpowers – but he goes on to pour reassuringly cold water on their fears. “Normal one-sigma powers aren’t much to worry about. We’re talking about powers like the unerring ability to stand on a tube platform right where the doors of the train will open, every time. Or to call pigeons. That’s single-sigma stuff: it’s nothing you can’t match with careful training or a bag of stale bread crumbs. In fact, half the people in this room are practitioners with powers equal to or exceeding a three-sigma superhero or supervillain – if you have the advance notice and equipment to set it up.”

  I raise my hand. “Tell me about the four and five sigmas.”

  “I can’t.” He’s blunt but looks apologetic. “The four sigmas are typically stronger than a locomotive and faster than a speeding bullet – until air friction burns their face off. There’s a wide range of abilities, often stacked in multiples. Strip Jack Spratt” – I wince – “was probably a three- to four-sigma super-whacko. A four sigma is probably able to equal the capabilities of a DSS, if they had the training and self-discipline.” A DSS is a Detached Special Secretary, in Laundry speak – unofficially, a Deeply Scary Sorcerer. (Mahogany Row members are all at that level or above: but most of the Laundry doesn’t know or isn’t cleared for or doesn’t understand Mahogany Row.) “A five sigma would be something we haven’t met yet, and a walking disaster if they turn out to be malevolent. We’re talking superheroes or supervillains out of Marvel or DC Comics here. Superfast, superstrong, pretty much invincible. If they turned out bad, our only hope would be to outwit them or rely on superior logistics and organizational capabilities to wear them down.”

  I raise my hand again. People are beginning to look at me oddly. “What about Officer Friendly? Or Professor Freudstein?”

  Our tame epidemiologist frowns. “Officer Friendly is probably a three- to four-sigma case. Super-strength, flight, night vision. Plus there’s that armor of his. He has to have a tech support backup – possibly a four-sigma tinker, or maybe it’s outsourced to BAe Systems.” (I’ve been asking myself questions. Like: Officer Friendly flies around wearing blue body armor, complete with a piece of protective headgear modeled on the classic British bobby’s custodian helmet, with a flashing beacon light on top. So who made it for him?) “I could venture some speculations, but I’d rather not. He only seems to turn up when the Police need him; let’s leave it at that.”

  “And Freudstein?” I repeat.

  “Professor —” He glances round the room. “At first glance he looks like a five-sigma super-intelligence. Bu
t there’s something about it that smells funny. I have some ideas, but nothing concrete,” he says abruptly. “See me later.”

  But I don’t get a chance to do that.

  Dr. Michael Armstrong, the Senior Auditor, has an office in the New Annex. And on Wednesday, after my Home Office meeting, I visit him in his office.

  If you walk the length of the plushly carpeted corridor called Mahogany Row, you may or may not notice a discreetly paneled door. It depends on whether or not its occupant wants you to see it. The office behind it overflows the bounding-box described by the architectural plans for the New Annex: it’s about five meters longer and two meters wider than it can be and still fit within the walls. Also, it’s on the fourth floor, but I am told the window looks out on a vista from ground level. As you can imagine, some people find that sort of thing disturbing.

  “Come in, Mo,” he says, surprisingly informally. “Make yourself at home.”

  I would think his den was invitingly collegiate if I didn’t know exactly what he does for a living. The SA was, until a week ago, Angleton’s supervisor: his hall monitor, sanity check, what-have-you. The SA isn’t himself an unhuman entity like the Eater of Souls, but you don’t put someone in charge of Angleton unless they have the power to bind and release demons from the depths of the dungeon dimensions, and more besides.

  Two decades ago Dr. Armstrong was one of the most powerful members of the Invisible College (as Mahogany Row is sometimes still known by the oldest of old-timers). Today, he largely works in a supervisory role. They relied too much on ritual magic back in the day: Krantzberg syndrome was an ever-present risk. So they thought it best to retire at the peak of their abilities, to a position where their experience (and their insight into the temptations and corruptions a practitioner can fall victim to) was still of use to the organization. He’s still an extremely powerful sorcerer – it’s just that if he makes much use of his skills, he stands to lose them in the most unpleasant manner imaginable.

  As I enter his office I look around. The interior is dominated by floor-to-ceiling bookcases on three sides. One wall is interrupted by an archaic cast-iron radiator set beneath a sash window, the view through which is concealed by curtains. As it’s the outer wall of his office, but the inner wall is barely inside the building, I am not terribly keen to see the landscape it opens onto. Michael’s desk is pretty much what you’d expect, although most of its top is covered by a beautiful Victorian escritoire, a leather-topped writing slope. The other half supports an ancient green-screen computer terminal, the variety that uses a cathode ray tube to display wavering little monospaced characters and can’t do graphics at all. Angleton might have disapproved, but I find the SA’s reliance on such intermediate technology rather charming, like a penchant for 1970s sports cars or a complete collection of Grateful Dead bootlegs.

  “You wanted to talk to me.”

  “Yes, I wanted to talk to you.” His silence is thoughtful.

  He gestures at a battered-looking sofa next to the window. As I walk over to it he drags his office chair out from behind his desk – it’s an antique banker’s swivel chair, an oak-and-leather forerunner to the Herman Miller monstrosity in my own office – and sits down in it so that the desk doesn’t separate us. The sofa tries to swallow me. Escape may be difficult.

  “You shut down the enquiry rather fast.”

  “Yes, I did.” His pensive stare is directed at a bookshelf about a meter to the right of my shoulder, for which I am grateful.

  “Why?” I ask bluntly. “Is the Audit Commission compromised?”

  After a disturbingly long pause he replied: “I don’t think so.”

  Oh dear. Oh dear. Oh dear. “Then what?”

  “Tell me about your suspicions.” He smiles. It’s the avuncular smile of an executioner shaking his client’s hand and reassuring him that this won’t hurt at all.

  I swallow. “I trust Emma MacDougal implicitly,” I say. “But her staff selections are a little bit too selective for it to be a coincidence, don’t you think?”

  “Which selections?” He raises an eyebrow. “No, wait: you look a little fraught. Hmm. You have no more meetings scheduled until after lunchtime.” (I’m not sure how he knows that: the only thing in this office that’s capable of talking to the departmental calendar server is my phone.) “Let me offer you an aperitif. And a little something else.” He reaches around the side of his desk and opens a drawer, from which he takes two cut glass tumblers and a dark green bottle.

  “Um.” I stare at the bottle. “Organization policy on drinking in the workplace says —”

  “I predate it, and I outrank it. I do not propose to get you drunk, merely slightly relaxed, with a lunch break in which to recover your composure before you return to your office.”

  “But what if —” I begin to frame another objection.

  “Dr. O’Brien.” There is a steely glint in his eye as he breaks the seal on a bottle of single malt that is not only older than I am but probably costs more than I earn in a week. “This organization trusts you to carry a certain violin.” I instinctively reach for the case that sits at my feet. “As for me, I spent six years with that instrument singing to me in my dreams. You are still alive. I believe that you have demonstrated sufficient willpower that you can withstand a single measure of the water of life.”

  He hands me a tumbler. I accept it in stunned silence, and inhale the nose. The whisky is amazing: smoky, peaty, with a lingering slightly sweet after-note. I hold it until he raises his glass in a toast: “To your success.”

  “My what?”

  “You’ve carried him – I used to call him Dracula – for the third longest time that anybody has managed. In fact, you’re a week away from making it into second place. That’s very impressive, Doctor, but it can’t go on forever.”

  “It can’t?” I sip the whisky. “Of course not, but I mean, you carried him?”

  “Yes, for a number of years before he passed into your hands.” Dr. Armstrong examines me coolly. He reaches into his desk drawer and pulls out a small packet. “I think you should take this. You can use it to call on me at any time if you think you can’t cope anymore. Hopefully it’s an unnecessary precaution, just in case. There was a gap between I and my successor, you know. I’m afraid I could only handle him for six years and two months before he hospitalized me.”

  He takes another sip. I notice that the skin on the backs of his hands is wrinkled with age, and liver-spotted: they are shaking slightly, and I realize that not once has he looked directly at Lecter’s case. I open the packet and shake a silver chain and a small bangle into my hand.

  “What happened?” I ask, running the chain through my fingers.

  “That’s a story for another time,” he says. “For now, just hang on to that. When you can’t bear it anymore, call me and I’ll come. But that’s not why I invited you here today: what I really want is for you to tell me about your suspicions. What do you think is wrong?”

  I take a deep breath and try to relax. It’s the wrong move: I shudder, transfixed by a sudden irrational fear that we’re being listened in on by Mhari. “It, it’s the staff assignments coming from HR.” I take a mouthful of raw spirit, disrespectfully fast, choke on it, and start to cough. He says nothing but simply waits me out. He recognizes a delaying tactic when he sees one, damn it. “I have a problem with the violin.”

  He nods encouragement.

  I laugh, shakily. “Bob is convinced it wants to eat him.”

  Armstrong looks understanding. “Yes, I can understand that.”

  I shiver. “Bob and I are, are living apart. While we sort things out. There’ve been incidents. Problems. You know he’s the Eater of Souls now. The violin and the hungry ghost do not see eye-to-eye.”

  A pause, then: “I understand.” He speaks in the distant, respectful tones of an undertaker.

  “Emma MacDougal sent me a brilliantly qualified deputy director. On paper, she’s absolutely the best possible pick. Management f
ast-track, MBA, extremely ambitious and motivated, a real self-starter. Only she, she, she’s Mhari Murphy.”

  “Do you have a problem with Ms. Murphy?” Armstrong asks sympathetically.

  “She’s Bob’s ex! And she’s a PHANG, and the last time we met before she was assigned to me, she was sleeping in my living room – Bob had invited her, it was the night of the Code Red and he said she needed a safe house to stay where nobody would think to look for her – and we, we —” I swallow. “Lecter tried to murder her.”

  “Lecter.” He raises an eyebrow. “Also known as Dracula?”

  I nod.

  “Well then, I can see why you might have a problem,” he says soothingly. “But she’s still on your organization chart? Have you…?”

  “No.” I swallow. “As I said, she’s superbly suited for the job: it’d be a disaster to lose her over something so, so stupid. So we came to a working agreement. I don’t know if it’ll hold.” I take another sip of whisky. “I trust her as far as I can throw her. She’s a vampire and an ambitious bitch besides, and I still get panic attacks when she comes up behind me. But she’s scared of me, too. Or she’s scared of Lecter. Balance of terror in the boardroom: what an innovative and ingenious way to run a department, got to keep the directors on their toes…” I stop, because I’m babbling again.

  “Aside from Ms. Murphy, who as you note is superbly qualified for the job, do you have any other problems?” he asks.

  “Yes! Emma sent me a personnel manager who shouldn’t even be in the organization at all! Do you know the background to JENNIFER MORGUE?” He nods. “BLUE HADES have come over all helpful. Two weeks ago, at the treaty birds-of-a-feather, I ran into Ramona Random. Purely at random, of course, except it wasn’t and you can’t convince me it’s any kind of accident that they sent her to us as a liaison body and HR sent her to me to babysit. Tell me, what kind of circus are we running that a rival firm can inject a known operative into our organization and we’re expected to babysit them? It’s worse than crazy, it’s against OPSEC doctrine! Hell, it’s a photographic negative of OPSEC doctrine!” I realize my voice has risen to a shrill whine when he winces, and I shut it down quick.