The Annihilation Score

by Charles Stross

  So Sam, Nick, and Sara have gone home and at half past six I’m all alone in the office, finishing up my PowerPoint slides for tomorrow’s all-hands, when there’s a knock on the door. “Come in,” I say, not looking up.

  “Hi, I’m your new deputy director—oh shit.”

  I look up, and freeze.

  “You,” we both say at the same time.

  The door swings shut behind my new deputy director with a solid click.

  I stare at her, calculating angles and distances. It doesn’t look good: Lecter is about three meters behind my chair, leaning against the corner between the windows. I don’t have a gun or a knife, Facilities haven’t installed the security wards in this room yet, and there’s no panic button. Even if I had a hotline to the blue-suiters on the front desk, I very much doubt they could get here in time to help.

  “What’s that on your face?”

  “Theatrical makeup.” Her glare could curdle milk. “Nobody mentioned I’d be working for you. What a fucking mess.”

  “Take a seat,” I say, heart pounding and the small of my back suddenly prickling-hot and slick with sweat.

  “No thanks, I’d rather stand.”

  Mhari stares at me: I stare back at her.

  She’s a willowy blonde with a figure fit to send vapid twenty-something non-supermodels into paroxysms of jealousy. Her only flaw is that her face is pancaked with theatrical quantities of makeup. She does the severe-office-power-suit thing way better than I do: everything’s black except for her high-collared red silk blouse. She looks like the walking human incarnation of a venomous spider. It takes me an extra moment to notice that she’s wearing opaque black hosiery and gloves: the only skin on display is her face. “Nice outfit. Sun getting to you?”

  “It’s a workaround.” She reaches into her handbag and produces a pair of mirrored aviator shades. “A sub-optimal one.” She twirls them lazily between left index finger and thumb, like an Old West gunslinger.

  I need to get control of this situation. Fast. “I’ll give you a choice. You can go out the door, go back to whatever box they put you in, and I’ll tell Emma to roll the dice again. Without prejudice. Or you can sit down”—I point at the chair—“right now and we will work this out.”

  My heart is going about a hundred and fifty beats a minute, and I’m so keyed up that my hand is shaking: I lower it hastily, in case she notices. Coldsweat terror claws at the back of my neck.

  “Promise you won’t try to kill me with that thing.” I note her gaze tracking towards the corner between the windows. My perspective flips, in another of those dizzying Rubin vase moments: Is she afraid of me?

  “Don’t be silly, killing one’s staff is workplace harassment. Definitely gross misconduct: I think it’s a sacking offense.” (It’s also murder, and the Black Assizes take a very dim view of it, but I don’t bring that up: I don’t want her to feel too comfortable.) I pause. “Sit down and let’s talk things over like grown-ups.”

  She sits, but she’s wound up like a watch spring: back straight, knees together, oversized black leather handbag clenched on her lap. “Is this some kind of sick joke?”

  I consider the idea. “Very possibly.” But if so, who is the joke aimed at? And where’s the joker?

  “Emma told me this is a new departmental start-up, a public front to deflect attention from the Laundry. Also an attempt to contain the pervert suit problem.”

  Very succinct. “Yes.”

  “You’re directing it, why? Is this something to do with yesterday’s headlines?”

  Kid, you have no idea. I nod, stiffly. “I’ve been reallocated. My old job became nonviable the, the instant the TV cameras locked on.”

  “Oh.” I recognize that expression from somewhere. I wish I didn’t: I don’t need her sympathy, however grudging. “Right.”

  I lace my fingers together in front of me to stop my hands from shaking with the effort of not fidgeting as I stare back at her: “Why do you think Emma thought you were suited for the role of deputy director of this unit?” I see her hesitate, so I add, “If it helps, try to imagine you’re talking to someone else. Animal, vegetable, sentient cauliflower from Arcturus: it doesn’t matter, just as long as they’re not me.”

  “I don’t need egg-sucking lessons.” Her lip curls, momentarily supercilious, then she realizes what she’s doing and hides it behind an instantly raised hand. Anything to avoid slipping me a flash of the old ivory gnashers. “Really, it’s not hard. I spent three years in HR, back in the day. Then I transferred to the deactivation list and was out-placed into the second-largest investment bank in Europe. While I was working there I did a part-time MBA and worked in a variety of roles, most recently as the operations manager for an internal business unit with a turnover of roughly two hundred million pounds a year.” She squares her shoulders and sticks her chest out: “I am also a blood-sucking fiend, out and proud. Superpowers: I have them. What do you bring to the table, Mrs. Howard?”

  I grin and bare my teeth at her: “That’s Dr. O’Brien to you, Ms. Murphy.”

  I glance over my shoulder at Lecter: his case is the right way round to display the sticker on its side. THIS MACHINE KILLS DEMONS.

  “That facetious bumper-sticker sums up what I used to do for our organization—our real organization, that is. I destroy emergent threats. When I’m not doing field work, I have a PhD in philosophy of mathematics, lecture part-time in music theory at Birkbeck, and specialize in the application of fast Fourier transforms to psychoacoustic summoning systems. And I appear to be your designated line manager.”

  Superpowers I do not have, but I’ve got five years on this highly annoying person, and age and guile trump youth and enthusiasm—or so they say. I must remember to bear in mind that I’ve only got five years on her: she may be able to pass for her early twenties but she’s roughly Bob’s age. Unfortunately, in addition to the butterflies that come of knowing I’m unarmed and in the presence of a potentially immortal and superstrong obligate carnivore, I’ve got a curious sinking sensation in my stomach. It comes from the realization that, on paper at least, Mhari is impressively well-qualified to be my executive officer.

  “Right,” she says crisply. “So. The job of this unit is to generate and then execute a strategy for containing and mitigating the superhero nuisance. We’ve got office space, two analysts, and a target—?” She raises a latex-smeared eyebrow and I nod, very slightly. “And all that’s holding us back is a marked lack of trust between the designated director and their executive assistant.”

  I nod again.

  She leans forward as she speaks, loudly and clearly: “I did not fuck your husband.”

  I nod once more, feeling cornered despite all the empty space behind my chair.

  Mezzo forte: “I didn’t even drink his blood!”

  The only way to respond is fortissimo: “So that makes everything all right?”

  (I swear at myself: she’s clearly trying to build bridges, why am I trying to knock them down?)

  She rises to a crescendo: “Can we agree that he should probably have let you know I was staying over?”

  If pauses can be pregnant, this one’s on the run from a fertility clinic. A drop of sweat trickles down the small of my back. Re-evaluate. Re-evaluate. Prioritize. On Monday morning I have to stand up in front of the Home Secretary and deliver a cogent, achievable plan for getting Her Majesty’s Government out in front of the paranormal power-assisted pervert suit menace, stat. This woman, who I dislike intensely, who seriously fucked up Bob before I met him and spent a couple of years working through his neuroses about the opposite sex, this woman who I trust as far as I can throw her, this Vampire Bitch from Human Resources who nearly triggers panic attacks when I see her, also happens to be exactly the strong right arm that I need to get the job done.

  And besides, she’s got a point. Even if it falls perilously close
to blaming the one person who isn’t present at the meeting.

  “Yes.”

  “Fine!” She switches on a smile so manic that I’m certain the last pixie dream girl she mugged is in need of a face transplant. “Does that mean you agree that the potential exists for us to construct and maintain an arm’s-length business relationship based on team values, mutual esteem, and peer-to-peer respect for our complementary abilities? One that’s free from any incursion of bedroom politics and green-eyed jealousy?”

  Oh for fuck’s sake. If I could mend fences with Ramona I ought at least try to get along with Mhari without sucking her soul out through her eyeballs with my violin. As long as she keeps her fangs out of my neck and Bob out of her bed, I can probably do this. “Jealousy is such a nasty word,” I say. Then I narrow my eyes. “But I have a question for you. Why are you so keen to work with me?”

  Mhari rolls her eyes. “Because, in business terms, you just parachuted straight into the CEO’s seat of an entrepreneurial startup that bypassed the incubator and angel rounds and went straight to a juicy Series A term sheet.” Some of the tension has leached out of her shoulders: the handbag sits limp on her lap, her knees aren’t clenched as tightly, she no longer looks—good Lord, she was terrified!

  “You probably think I’m an ambitious greasy-pole climber. If so, you’d be absolutely right. You might just have noticed that I have special dietary needs: expensive ones. The Laundry will find a way to feed me, no questions asked, as long as I make myself useful. You might be a workaholic who lives for the job, but if I don’t work, I don’t get to live. Not dying is a wonderful motivating factor, don’t you think? So I need to make myself indispensable, or at least too useful to put down.”

  She relaxes infinitesimally as she gets into her pitch, but her expression remains intense. I have the uneasy sense that I’m getting a window on the real Mhari’s soul, one that she doesn’t draw back the curtains on very often.

  “In business, the fastest way to the top is to join a new organization in the early days and make it grow under you. If you join an established company, you have to fight your way up through all the accumulated dead wood. Unfortunately, new banking start-ups don’t come along very often. The Scrum was going to be my ticket to the boardroom, but then PHANG happened. So, anyway, speaking as an ambitious management bitch, my plan is simple: get on board a new org chart early, push for growth, Series B, Series C. There is no IPO when you’re part of a government agency—the usual breakout in the age of privatization is to be spun off as a GovCo, then sold to one of the big service corporations—but there is a plateau of stability when the growth curve stabilizes, at which point the executives can run out the gangway and waltz back over to rejoin their parent organizations at a much higher level than they were at when they left, a comparatively short time ago. Take you, for example: if this works, your new department won’t last forever—but if you go back to the Laundry, you’ll take your new grade with you.”

  Wow. If this was a marketing presentation, it would be standing ovation time. Her intensity is terrifying: it makes me want to pin a notice on her power suit saying FRONT TOWARDS ENEMY. An idea for how to harness her dangerous energy begins to percolate up from the depths of my subconscious. I keep a lid on it for now—the interview isn’t over yet—but it bears exploration, just as soon as I’ve cleared up some loose ends.

  “Okay, I hear where you’re coming from. I have a couple of follow-on questions, though. Does your condition mean you’ll have difficulty keeping regular office hours or appearing in public? And what are you doing about, um, eating in the short term?”

  “My condition is my problem,” she says tartly. “You might want to bear in mind the civil service policy guidelines on respect for disabilities in the workplace before you ask such questions. But, since you ask: in the absolute worst case, a full traditional hijab and niqab will keep me from frying, and in overcast and twilight conditions I can get away with theatrical face paint and sunglasses. So yes, I can be on hand during core office hours, although I’ll need to have blackout blinds fitted in my office. Point deux: I still mostly eat normal food. The question of how to provide a regular supply of my special dietary supplement is being dealt with by a committee chaired by Dr. Wills.” For an instant I see a flicker of something that might almost be grief cross her face, but the pancake of latex and foundation she’s wearing makes it hard to read micro-expressions. “Again, may I remind you of our policy on disabilities? Other people have equally distasteful needs. It’s only relatively recently that individuals with growth hormone deficiency gained a source of somatotropin that wasn’t harvested from cadaver brains, for example.”

  “I—I—I—” I restart: “You’ve made your point.”

  I stand up, slowly, and warily make my way around my desk—and she stands up, her posture defensive. Fight or flee? I suppress a panic-shudder and stop a meter away from her, just outside her personal space. Then I force myself to raise my right hand.

  “Welcome aboard,” I say. After a second, she raises her hand, too. We shake, very gingerly. Her nylon-sheathed fingers are slippery and cool.

  “No back-stabbing,” she says. Maybe it’s an offer.

  “No annoying personal shit,” I counter-offer. “Let’s keep it one hundred percent professional.”

  She nods, unsmiling. “All right. Now what?”

  I exhale slowly, still shuddery-shaky from my initial reaction to her. “Tomorrow, at two o’clock, I’m holding an all-hands. I’m supposed to deliver a briefing, with concrete proposals, to the Home Secretary on Monday morning. Everything is secondary to that. We’re going to be working in crunch mode until then—we’ve got a looming first deadline, and if we don’t make it, we are dead in the water. So dead there won’t be a hole deep enough to bury us in. So it’s going to be sixteen-hour days and working all weekend if necessary. Unfortunately I’ve also got some off-site stuff to do—stuff that is so time-critical it can’t wait, because it may feed into the HomeSec’s briefing—so I need you to keep an eye on the analysts and manage the new intake of staff while I’m out of the office.”

  She bites her lower lip, still keeping her canines discreetly out of sight. “Do you have a strategy?”

  “I do indeed.” I reach over to the desk and spin the notebook round so that we can both see the screen. “Let me talk you through it . . .”

  6.

  AN EXCITABLE BOY

  I stumble through my hotel room’s doorway just after eleven o’clock, bone-tired and shaky from the post-adrenaline crash. I’m still only half-certain there’s a chance that my paper plane will leave the runway. Mhari and I put in nearly four hours on the key strategy proposal and my presentation, and she kicked the tires very thoroughly before she handed me the metaphorical air hose. If she can be trusted to hold up her end of the deal, we might be able to make it fly. If. If. Ah well. I may not trust her personally—actually, I can barely hold back my fight/flight impulse in her presence—but I can’t fault her motivation.

  If I can learn not to break out in a hot flush (or get the shudders or random stabs of ossified reflexive jealousy) when she walks in the door—and if she can learn not to jump out of her skin when I pick up my violin case (as she did when we were leaving, and then she tried to make a shaky-voiced joke of it)—we can make policy faster than a speeding bullet and leap tall buildings full of paperwork.

  But it’s going to take practice and a lot of patience.

  Once I crawl between the sheets, I go out like a lamp. Sleep is dreamless at first, but some time in the small hours I awaken just enough to do the bathroom sleepwalk shuffle—and when I go back to bed I start to dream. I’m on that monochrome dance floor again, whirling in the arms of my white-clad faceless lover. This time it’s no waltz; I’m gothed up like my mid-teenaged self’s vision of her aspirational adult persona—all rather jejune, with way too much black lace: what can I say, it was a phase I was
going through—as we dance to a New Romantic/eighties synthpop beat. There’s a band between the columns of speakers, faceless men in suits surrounded by a wall of ancient Korg and Yamaha kit. “The Damned Don’t Cry,” “Enola Gay”: as we whirl to the dance floor beat I feel like a machine, as soulless as my partner.

  Who leans towards my face and whispers, ***You could have taken her soul.***

  “You say that like you think I should want it.” His voice is autumn leaves blowing through the doorway of an open crypt; mine is toneless.

  He pulls me closer. ***You should have taken her. She lied to you.***

  “I can’t kill people just because they lie to me. Or because I don’t like them.”

  He laughs and whirls me in a tight circle. I lean backwards, relying on his arms around me for support. ***You’ve killed people you didn’t like before. Firouz the Pasdaran lieutenant, in Vakilabad. The nest of idiot goat-worshipers in Amstelveen. Your—***

  “Shut up and dance.” It’s not a very goth dance, it’s far too intimate. I break out of his grip, sway sidelong away, then catch the rhythm: grab the bat, hug the bat, drop the bat. Work those hips, raise your arms: big box, little box, big box, little box. Back to swaying on the spot: grab the bat, hug the bat, drop the bat, kick the bat across the dancefloor. Then I grab the bat again and suddenly find my arms filled by my dance partner, his arms wrapped around me like the steel bars of an impossible cage.

  ***Love is all you need,*** he whispers breathily in my ear, and runs his tongue down the side of my neck to the base of my throat.

  The rasp of his flinty tongue strikes a spark that sets me on fire. I wrap my arms around him and play intimate chords of power on the fingerboard of his spine. He shivers eerily and lifts me, and I wrap my knees around his hips, then—the logic of dreams holds no brief for zippers, underwear, or hook-and-eye fasteners—his teeth are locked around my painfully taut right nipple as he lowers me onto his sound post.