The Annihilation Score

by Charles Stross

  I smile at him pleasantly and put my cup down. Okay, so he’s a player and he wants something: probably the obvious, to grab my unit and turn it into a new leaf on their org tree. Here comes the pitch. “What’s the first reason?” I ask.

  He flashes me a quick grin: “I’m Officer Friendly.”

  * * *

  I give him my best vacant stare. “Is that supposed to mean something to me?” Jo said something about Officer Friendly, didn’t she? And come to think of it, Ramona . . . “I haven’t been following the news much,” I admit.

  He chuckles. He doesn’t sound offended, which is a relief. “That’s all right. Officer Friendly hasn’t been out there ‘fighting crime’ for very long. Um. This is in confidence, you understand, because you do have need to know, but I’d rather my secret identity didn’t get noised around needlessly.”

  “I feel your pain,” I say fervently. “Been there, done that, I won’t drop you in it. But who exactly is Officer Friendly, when he’s not wearing Chief Superintendent Grey’s uniform?”

  “I’m still finding out.” He flashes me a grin that takes twenty years off his age. “I woke up with a terrible headache about nine months ago. Thought I was having a stroke, so I got out of bed to call an ambulance—and just keeled over. Fainted dead. When I woke up I stumbled to the bathroom, didn’t realize at the time that the electricity was out and it was pitch black—I could see just fine. It wasn’t until I ripped the towel rail off the wall drying my hands that I realized I had acquired super-strength as well as night vision. I tried to push the rail back, and it just bent. Like warm toffee, not chromed steel tubing.”

  He picks up his coffee cup delicately and blows on it. “The other powers took a while to show up. For instance, it took me about two weeks to realize I could fly and a month or two after that to fully debug it. I’m afraid I scared the crap out of the police free-fall club in the process: it confuses them if they follow you out of the plane and you meet them in the clubhouse afterwards with your parachute still in its pack.”

  “That must give you an interesting perspective,” I say cautiously. “So you fight crime?”

  “Actually, that’s an oversimplification.” He shows me that grin again: “I uphold my oath to enforce the law by carrying out my assigned duties. Fighting is sloppy rhetoric: How do you fight an abstraction, like crime? I just happen to have unusual abilities that enable me to support my fellow officers in unconventional situations. Being Officer Friendly is actually a nuisance: it gets in the way of my real job, and I wish I could delegate it to someone else. I’m a super, I direct operations at divisional level, I’m not supposed to be out on the beat nicking petty offenders. Doesn’t matter whether or not they can fly, brainwash people into falling asleep, or teleport the contents of a jeweler’s window display into their backpack, they’re still individual criminals.”

  I take another mouthful of mocha. I suddenly feel ravenously hungry, and realize it’s nearly noon and I skipped breakfast. “That hadn’t occurred to me,” I admit. “It’s an unusual drawback.”

  “Yeah. The last thing you want is for your superpowers to be concentrated at the top of the pyramid instead of the bottom. On the other hand, it has its compensations. Officer Friendly dropping in to lend a hand during an armed siege is good for morale. It’s fun to get out of the office a couple times a week. And”—his forehead wrinkles ruefully—“I suppose it gives me slightly more insight into supervillain psychology than most officers have. On top of the crim. psych. degree.”

  “So you think you’d be a good fit to lead Transhuman Policy Coordination’s superhero team?”

  He shakes his head. “Not lead, exactly, no. But once you’ve staffed it, you’re going to need a big stick to keep the egos in line. Correct me if I’m wrong, but that”—he points at my violin case with his spoon—“is more of a sawn-off shotgun than a side-arm baton? You need someone who can handle the police procedural aspect of the operation, but who your team know isn’t just a paper pusher.”

  “You make a cogent case.” I make a show of checking my watch, then drain my mug. “Listen, I’m due in another meeting in half an hour and I’m running late, but I really want to take this further. Do you have a card?” He nods, and we do the business-card-swapping thing. “Great. Got to run. See you later!”

  And I’m out of there before he can work his way any further into my confidences. He’s smooth. Wow, is he smooth: he’s almost too good to be true. And I did not get this job by taking anything at face value—even straight-arrow superheroes in police uniforms.

  Memo to self: as soon as I get a chance to check my email, send a request for information up the line. Because if you’ve been lying to me, Officer Friendly, you are so screwed.

  * * *

  Picture the scene later that evening: it’s nine o’clock at night in the O’Brien/Howard household, currently reduced to just me, my violin, and my husband’s cat. I got home a couple of hours ago, showered, changed into jeans and a sweater to remind myself I wasn’t working and am supposed to decompress while off-duty, and made myself a lonely supper for one: M&S prepackaged salad (ugh) and the remains of a chicken I’ve been working on.

  I’ve started to tackle the washing-up and I’m about to perform triage on the fridge contents—it’s astonishing how quickly food goes off when you downsize your family by 50 percent—when my mobile trills for attention.

  I grab it with soapy hands and nearly drop it when I see it’s Mhari calling. “Yes?” I demand, tensing in anticipation of bad news.

  “Boss, we just got a Code Blue—”

  The landline from work rings. “Hang on,” I tell her, and dash into the front hall to grab the ancient Bakelite handset. “O’Brien here, DO. Is this a Code Blue for my team?”

  I have the unique pleasure of hearing surprise in the Duty Officer’s voice. “Yes, Doctor, I have an all-hands call out for the Transhuman Policy Coordination team. Incident on Euston Road—”

  “Please hold,” I tell him. To the phone in my other hand: “Mhari, are you getting this? Euston?”

  “Yes, I’m on my way out the door.”

  “Okay, I’ll meet you there. Notify the analysts, I’ll handle the DO.”

  She hangs up and I focus on one thing at a time: “Sitrep please.”

  “Freudstein just hit the British Library . . .”

  It takes me twenty-two minutes to get to Euston Road, most of them spent trying not to throw up all over the floor of a police car whose driver is in a real hurry. My mobile is ringing almost constantly throughout the trip, adding to my nausea with a constant diet of dismaying information. This time Freudstein didn’t make it in and out before we got the news: there’s still a chance he’s on the scene, so every second counts. Mhari is on her way, and so are about half of SCO19, the specialist firearms command. Everybody is very excited and keyed up, which is exactly what we don’t need right now because it’s the perfect recipe for a blue-on-blue clusterfuck.

  My driver screeches to a halt at one end of a pileup of patrol cars, dog vans, and firearms units that stretches halfway from Euston to St Pancras. Sirens and the strobing of many light bars turn the night to hell. It’s raining lightly and a pall of smoke hangs on the air. I bail out, look around for the nearest body who looks as if they’re directing traffic—the cops are sending the buses and taxis that normally clog this stretch of road linking three of London’s biggest railway terminals on a magical mystery tour to keep them out of stray bullet range—and walk towards him, holding up my warrant card.

  “Stop right there, miss! Don’t move!”

  The constable who gets in my face this time is much less friendly than the ones in Trafalgar Square, even before you get to the semiautomatic carbine he’s carrying—a submachine gun by any other name. I freeze, but raise my voice, keeping the card where he can see it: “O’Brien, Transhuman Policy Coordination, Security Service, responding to co
ntrol request for specialist backup. Take me to—”

  “Stand down!” The stentorian roar seems to come from about a meter above and behind my left ear. “Stand down!”

  I can’t help myself: I jump halfway out of my skin as I turn and look.

  You’ve seen TV news broadcasts and newspaper reports and maybe even thinly fictionalized movies, but nothing can prepare you for your first superhero.

  Officer Friendly looms behind me, silhouetted against the red-brick wall surrounding the library campus by the flickering light bars of vans and fire engines—one of which I now see is wedged in the crumpled and bent steel vehicle gates opening onto the piazza, stopping them from closing. He hovers a meter above the street and I can see a faint shimmering beneath the ridged soles of his steel boots. His suit is blue, somewhere between cobalt and dull gunmetal in shade, a thing of interlocking slabs of metal that is more like a deep-sea diver’s hardshell or a space suit than mediaeval armor. There’s an elaborate equipment belt, of course, and a Tetra radio handset incongruously clipped to his left pauldron, screen glowing pale gray. His face is a steel glacis pierced by narrow, dark vision slots beneath an armored copy of the regular policeman’s custodian helmet. The light beacon on top pulses lazily, flaring blue against the night.

  “Doctor O’Brien, this way please.” Officer Friendly descends from the sky and steps onto the pavement with a ponderous thud, boots clomping like the armored treads of a main battle tank. The firearms officer takes a step back and waves me past, then starts speaking into his radio headset.

  “Is Freudstein still inside the building?” I ask, hurrying beside him: Officer Friendly appears to move at a slow walk, but it’s only slow if you’re not trying to keep up.

  Jim cranks his megaphone down to a merely human volume level, for my ears only: “We don’t know. SCO19 have secured the perimeter and evacuated the admin block. Two security guards are unaccounted for.”

  “Is it on fire?”

  We reach the stretch of curb that fronts the library’s huge air conditioning outlet gratings, now silent. “We don’t know.” A group of armed officers are crouched behind the rear of the fire engine. “Freudstein’s minions hit the fire station up the street. They TDA’d two pumps at gunpoint just as a visitor in the library tripped the fire alarm. When the library gate guard saw fire engines with lights, he opened the gate at which point pump number one drove in and ram-raided the library shop front window. They rammed the other pump into the gate to block it.” (The gate opens into a piazza with sculptures, benches, a fountain, and the usual service/access entrances; viewed from ground level on the outside, the library is a windowless slab of red brick that sprawls across almost as much land as King’s Cross or St Pancras stations.) “The first responding officer attempted to gain entry but retreated when shots were fired. Since then there’s been no sign of anyone leaving, so we’ve got a potential hostage situation with the missing guards, not to mention the contents of the library.”

  I shudder: losing the library would be a catastrophe. The British Library is the second largest research library in the world, with over 150 million items in its catalog and about two hundred kilometers of shelves occupied by everything from a copy of every newspaper and book published in the UK to originals of the Magna Carta, the Codex Sinaiticus, and several collections of priceless ancient manuscripts. “You’re sure it’s Freudstein?” If he’s here, he’s probably after something important.

  Officer Friendly reaches into an armored pocket on one giant thigh and produces an evidence baggie. There’s a familiar-looking business card in it. “Found balanced on the steering wheel of the pump wedged in the gate.” Well, that tears it: so far Freudstein’s existence isn’t public knowledge. But that’s not going to last—it suggests we’re dealing with someone who’s hungry for fame.

  We’re level with the huddle of armed officers near the entrance. A couple of higher-ups are approaching on foot, winkled out of their offices in Scotland Yard by what promises to be the major incident of the decade. I see another familiar figure approaching. “She’s with me.” I point at Mhari and a minute later she’s with us, standing in the lee of the pump, looking like either an upwardly mobile plain-clothes detective inspector or an out-of-place banker.

  “J— Officer Friendly, this is my deputy director, Mhari Murphy. Mhari, this is Officer Friendly. I gather as a chief superintendent he’s the ranking officer here.” Mhari ducks her head and I see that some time after I left the office she scrubbed off the layered warpaint she uses as sunblock. She looks younger without it, and almost colorless.

  There’s a burst of radio chatter from the armed police, followed by some shifting around. One of them gets down and begins to worm his way under the crashed fire engine, pushing an assault rifle kitted out with night vision sights before him. Two others climb into the rear cab through the open door then disappear from view.

  “What’s going—”

  “Wait here,” Officer Friendly says tersely. Then he gathers himself and jumps. I’m expecting him to come back down with a jaw-rattling thud, but he soars up and over the wall and the fire engine and vanishes from view. A couple of seconds later there is indeed a loud thump as he lands on the far side of the obstacle, then a succession of shouted orders as half a dozen specialist firearms officers pour through the open doors of the fire engine and into the piazza beyond it.

  “I hate this,” Mhari says vehemently. “Who does he think we are?”

  I slide the violin’s case around and rest my hand on the handle. “Civilians who aren’t equipped for a shootout.”

  “Right.” Mhari unfastens her jacket, and that’s when I realize she’s wearing a discreet shoulder holster. Standard issue Glock 17, by the look of it. “What are we waiting for again?”

  I flick the catch on Lecter’s case and lift him out, then close the case and sling it over my shoulder. Mhari tenses. “Ever been part of a blue-on-blue incident?” I ask, and she pauses momentarily before she shakes her head. Very tactful of her. “Trust me, you don’t want to be.” Even more tactfully, I don’t ask if she’s been certificated to carry that popgun. Anyway it’s not as if she needs it.

  I hear more radio chatter from the two cops who’ve remained behind. One of them turns to us, his face pale in the gloom. “Ma’am, the super says they’ve secured the piazza and established a security cordon inside the lobby and library shop. If you’d care to—”

  Mhari doesn’t wait: she jumps for the back of the wedged fire engine and scrambles up and over it terrifyingly fast. I swear quietly and take the low road, through the back of the cab and over the seat-backs and then slither down through the front door: I don’t want to be silhouetted against the sky, and besides, I’m carrying.

  The smell of wood or paper smoke is much stronger inside the piazza, along with an acrid note that reminds me of Bonfire Night fireworks. My heart sinks. Whatever we find inside, it won’t be good: the bad guys’ black-clad minions have had half an hour to ram-raid a repository of the nation’s most precious treasures and set fire to the rest by way of a diversion. Police officers run past us and disperse to prearranged points close to the fire exits that open onto the piazza as we leg it towards the second fire engine, which is embedded in the shattered brick-and-plate-glass front of the institution’s bookshop. “How did they expect to escape?” Mhari asks quietly, echoing my own thoughts.

  “I don’t—”

  There’s a crackle of automatic gunfire from the direction of the elevator tower that overlooks the piazza, followed rapidly by really loud return fire from the specialist under the fire engine, about ten meters behind us. “Cover!” I shout, and Mhari blurs into motion, vanishing into the shattered front of the library lobby, pistol in hand. I don’t hang around either: if I could see the shooter, I could light him up with Lecter, but we’re exposed on the piazza and it’s just turned into a killing ground, as witness the AFOs all scuttling for cov
er like heavily armed cockroaches—

  We make it into the darkened lobby and go to ground behind the receptionist’s podium. The fire alarms are shrilling and there’s glass everywhere on the mosaic-inlaid floor. The central atrium of the library stretches up above us, but something is badly wrong: it takes me a second to realize that the five-story-high display cabinet full of rare manuscripts is leaning sideways, ripped away from its upper-floor supports and glass front smashed, in an act of calculated vandalism.

  “They’re still in here,” Mhari says quietly, leaning close to me. Her nostrils flare; her pupils are very wide, black holes in a paper-pale face.

  I shift my grip on Lecter. For a miracle, he’s obedient, waiting on my command: he shows no sign of thirsting after my executive officer. “Yes, and in a moment I’m going to locate them. Don’t be alarmed.” I raise the violin, flick on the pickups, and finger the strings as I lean back and point the pegboard up into the darkness of the mezzanine level. Mhari holds her breath and tenses but doesn’t flee. Meanwhile—

  Where are they? I ask, opening myself to the feeling of fingers on my bony spine—an indescribable sensation.

  ***Where are who?*** My instrument sounds lazily amused.

  Don’t fuck with me, Lecter. You know who I want.

  He doesn’t reply, but shows me. Pale dots in the twilight: blue figures determinedly moving between cover as they push further into the building at ground level. Further away, carmine drops of glowing blood pierce the night like a vampire’s kiss. They’re down below, in the archival stores under the public spaces of the library. Typical: Officer Friendly and his folks are storming the wrong floor.