“Yes, I think so, too,” she says. “The super-politician front with the level seven glamour is just a cover—the first secret identity. When you got him to drop it, the lizard-man wasn’t his real identity either—there was something even deeper going on. I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that it’s onion skins all the way down: just a vacuum wearing an empty suit.”
Jim speaks up. “I think we may just have met our first genuine five-sigma superpower. The question of whether he’s a superhero or supervillain is, at that level, strictly irrelevant.”
“Irrelevant, why?” Mhari crosses her arms.
Jim leans back: he looks almost bored. “Crime isn’t always black and white. It’s easy enough to finger petty criminals, but the high-level ones get really complicated. Was the 2007 financial crisis a crime? Certainly there were criminal actions involved: it flushed out Mr. Madoff’s pyramid scheme, for example. Over ten billion pounds were stolen. But that was just the ripple on the surface, as trillions of dollars of derivatives evaporated when the market lost confidence in their existence. Were those losses criminal? Were the naked short-sellers who gambled against the market and undermined confidence in it criminals? Or was something else going on? Sometimes bad stuff—crimes, even—happen, but there’s nobody to blame. And sometimes you get people who commit criminal acts for what they consider to be good moral reasons.”
“I don’t think—” Mhari begins, and I’m about to interrupt because I don’t want to get derailed into an argument over fraud between our super-cop and our former investment banker, but Jim rolls over her.
“Criminology,” he announces, “is the study of criminal behavior and criminal psychology. But it has an Achilles heel”—good grief, a cop who uses classical references and expects his audience to follow him—“insofar as we can only study the criminals who, through happenstance or stupidity, manage to get themselves arrested. Designated or self-proclaimed supervillains are idiots. They’re damaged narcissistic personalities acting out their needy cravings in the public gaze. They’re creating the spectacle of the absurd, Warholian junkies searching for their fifteen minutes of fame. Supervillain teams are even worse: they get locked into group-think and end up with the same failure modes as the homicidal maniacs who fly packed airliners into skyscrapers. But those are just the ones we know about.”
Suddenly Mhari focuses on him like a guided missile that’s just locked onto a target. “Like vampire elders,” she says thoughtfully.
Jim looks puzzled. “Elders?”
“Let me tell you the first law of vampire school.” She stands up and paces across the office to stand against the wall, daringly close to the window blinds. “The first law of vampire school is, if I can tell you’re a vampire, I must kill you. Because if I can tell, the sheeple—no offense, that’s how the elders think of you—might also notice, and institute national noonday naked roll calls or something.” She frowns at Jim. “Functional supervillains would be like vampire elders, staying out of the limelight, maybe even finding ways to dispose of the narcissists who risk drawing public wrath down upon the superpowered. Yes?”
“Possibly.” He looks pensive. “But there are super-criminals—I’m sorry, that’s unclear. I don’t mean criminals with superpowers, I mean criminals who overachieve spectacularly and get away with it. They’re so successful that they pass laws to legitimize their past actions: we don’t call them criminals, we call them the Prime Minister of Italy or the President of the Russian Federation. ‘Treason doth never prosper, what’s the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it Treason.’ Add superpowers to that kind of super-criminal and they could plausibly go where you’re pointing.” He looks up at Mhari. “But the Mandate isn’t a supervillain: he’s not damaged enough. He’s something worse.”
I sigh and shove a stray wisp of hair out of the way. “I’m going to get Sam and Nick to open a file on him,” I tell them. “I also need to seek advice from Legal—maybe even the DPP. We need guidance on how to handle political cases. The blowback could be immense if we start monitoring a candidate and it turns out he isn’t guilty of anything. But this bears further investigation. Just in case we’ve got a two-meter-tall flesh-eating lizard running for Parliament.”
“I really wouldn’t take the reptile face seriously,” Ramona chips in. Her smile is acid: “He’s riffing off David Icke, the whole lizard royal family conspiracy thing. It’s a double-blind to make anyone who sniffs him out look like a crank. I don’t know for sure what he is, but you can be certain the truth will be much, much worse.”
I start to shove my hair back into shape again, but end up clutching my forehead. A half-breed mermaid sent by the Deep Ones is telling me not to worry about shape-shifting lizards disguised as politicians? And a Chief Superintendent is telling me that there’s an entire category of criminal he can’t collar because they’re so successful they end up running the country? What next?
Mhari grimaces, baring her canines. “Which brings me to the next topic. I need you to follow up the requests for Nick and Sam to get access to TEMPORA, Mo—it’s been four days and we haven’t heard back from CESG. And Jim, these PNC and SIS login authorizations you offered to sort out are becoming an urgent priority. Without those information systems they’re not really able to pull their weight. Once they’ve got access I’d like to requisition at least two more analysts; we’re going to need bodies to build up a general database of known three-sigma and up superpowers, and more bodies to weed out potential employment candidates and, from the other end, persons of interest to monitor. If we can get those authorizations sorted out by tomorrow, they should be rolling out reports by the back end of next week—”
My smartphone vibrates for attention and I grab it. It’s Dr. Armstrong’s office line. Oh dear, this can’t be good. “Yes?” I say.
“Trouble,” he says crisply. “You can expect a major incident call to reach you within half an hour. Assemble your team, you’re going to have to deploy prematurely and at short notice.”
“Wait, what—”
“Can’t stay, got to run.” He hangs up on me. Meanwhile, Jim is answering his phone. “Yes? Yes? I see, sir. Can you repeat that—” He pulls out a pocket notebook and begins to scribble furiously in it. “Yes, certainly, yes, we can do that. Give me your number—” More scribbling. “All right, on our way. I’ll call you back once we’re mobile.”
He hangs up. “That was the Assistant Chief Constable for Greater Manchester. The GMP have got a major incident developing and they want our help right now.”
Well, fuck. We don’t even have a proper superhero team to deploy, just a bunch of managers suffering from post-traumatic interview syndrome. “What can you do?” I ask Jim.
He stands up. “I’d better suit up. Be right back, don’t go anywhere without me . . .”
I pick up Lecter and glance at the other two. “I know Jim can fly,” I say, “but what about the rest of us?”
“Leave it to me,” says Ramona. “Meet me in the subbasement car park in ten minutes; I’ve got to file a flight plan first . . .”
11.
BATTLE WITHOUT HONOR OR HUMANITY
The SA said that BLUE HADES have entrusted Ramona with some sort of exotic high-tech transportation device—but silly me, I wasn’t expecting a stealth, supersonic, vertical take-off submarine fueled by the eerily whistling ghosts of necromantically murdered dolphins.
I take the lift down to the basement with Ramona and Mhari, where we find a near-featureless blue-black lozenge squatting on the concrete floor of the car park. It looms out of the shadows, and I see that its top nearly touches the ceiling—there’s no obvious way for it to have gotten in here. As we approach, I get an unaccountable conviction that it’s bigger on the inside than the outside; also, that bits of it change shape whenever I look away. But the real problem I have is that I walk through this garage daily on my way to violin practice in the storeroom, and I’v
e never seen this thing in here before. The implications of its subtle presence are as disquieting as the SA’s office window vista.
Ramona drives her wheelchair up to the side of the darkling hull and touches it. An oval orifice dilates, rim pulling back like a squid’s siphon. “Follow me,” she says, cheerily. “To the fish-mobile!”
A short tunnel leads towards a cramped passenger compartment fitted with not-entirely-humanoid seats at the front of the vehicle. There’s some sort of glass cockpit affair at the apex of the narrowing compartment, a wraparound glassy curve that pulses with a dim glow. Ramona drives straight into it and parks her chair in the niche: four clusters of short tentacles sprout from the floor and twine around her wheels. “Make yourselves at home, and strap in,” she says over her shoulder. “We’re just waiting for Jim now.”
“The window—” Mhari sounds as tense as I feel.
“Relax. It isn’t glass, it’s a projection of what the hull sensors can see, downsampled and filtered to block out blindfire or basilisk attacks. It won’t burn you if your sunblock is compromised.”
I look around nervously. The seats look as if they came out of a stealth-fighter cockpit design exercise by H. R. Giger: clearly they share an aesthetic with our office furniture suppliers. I secure my violin in a storage bin against the wall beside my own chair, then sit down and try to work out the intricate five-point restraint system.
Mhari slides into the seat beside me, clips herself in, then takes a mask out of her handbag and pulls it on. “Like it?” she asks. Behind us Officer Friendly climbs into his chair, fully suited up: it creaks under his armored weight. The hatch contracts and my ears pop very slightly.
I’m watching Ramona over the back of her chair; she’s stroking and squeezing some disquietingly biomorphic controls—I hesitate to call them knobs or a joystick: the Boy’s Own Freudian symbolism with which aviation technology is freighted is bad enough as it is—but the way they change shape and pulse as she fondles them is truly disturbing. A hatch in the ceiling above her opens and a helmet drops down, dangling from a fat umbilical tentacle. (I’ll swear it has suckers.) She pulls it down over her head.
“What do you think of—” Mhari says, then: “Oh.”
We begin to move.
The motion is fluid and silent at first, utterly unlike any vehicle I’ve ever been in before (except for a brief hovercraft trip in my childhood, and that was tooth-rattlingly noisy). We glide forward between the concrete pillars of the car park, then turn smoothly towards the exit ramp. Faint ghostly whistles and pops accompany every change of direction. The hair on the back of my neck feels abruptly cold, and my ward burns against my skin. This is necromancy, but not the sort that starts with the destruction of human souls. Some other sapient species—a person, but not in human skin—was sacrificed and bound to power the engine behind us. It twists the computational geometry of spacetime around this capsule so that it changes position: entropy, information, and energy are all interconvertible sides of the same multidimensional coinage, one paid for in blood and agony. I shudder as Ramona drives our eerie vehicle up the exit ramp, pauses to check for cross-traffic, then turns into a street leading to Essex Road.
“From the outside, we look just like a white Mercedes Sprinter van,” she tells us. “Same bounding-box, same physics model, all simulated. In reality, we’re sitting inside a quasi-biological construct powered by necromantic information decay in a pocket universe—but try not to let that get to you.”
I look at Mhari, at a loss for mundane conversational gambits with which to defy the eerie twist to our reality. “Nice mask,” I say after a while.
She nods, expressionless. I can’t tell if she’s pleased: that’s probably the idea. Her face is concealed by a white lacquered shell with mirror-glass inserts where the eyes belong, and a pair of tiny silver fangs protruding from the ruby-painted upper lip. She’s bonded it to the front of a black silk balaclava, the neck of which is tucked inside the high collar of her blouse. With her black trouser-suit and gloves her skin is completely covered, protecting her from the lethal radiation of the day-star. And she actually looks—well, I’m not sure how to describe her. Scary is such an inadequate word, don’t you think?
“I thought if we were actually expected to kick ass in person we ought to look the part. So you can call me”—she pauses for dramatic effect—“White Mask.”
“You know, that’s actually quite a good name,” I agree, and pull my smartphone out to make a note of her alias.
“First law of vampire school,” she reminds me.
“What’s your creation story going to be?”
“It’s an origin story, and I haven’t thought of one yet. The truth is far too banal.”
“What do you think Ramona should—”
Ramona steers us onto the northbound carriageway of the A1 and hits the gas—or piles further torments upon the undead souls of the slaughtered porpoises, or whatever it takes to cause us to accelerate. We gather speed. I try to ignore the high-pitched whistling and sonar ticks as Mhari thinks about my question: “Ramona’s a fucking mermaid, Mo, all she has to do is drop her regular glamour and nobody will recognize her. That leaves Jim and you—”
“Don’t look round,” says Jim, so I look round.
“I said not to look,” Officer Friendly says reproachfully. He’s changed into a somewhat more compact version of his armor: the riot-van-friendly version. His face is invisible behind the mirrored visor of his helmet, and the blue light at its pointy apex is dimmed, pulsing like a sleeping laptop. As for the rest, it looks as if someone commissioned Stark Enterprises to design power-assisted battle armor for Judge Dredd. Or maybe it’s just the Territorial Support Group’s new model riot gear.
“Right,” I say faintly.
“Don’t worry,” Mhari reassures me, “you can just be Scary Violin Lady.” True enough, that pigeon’s already flown—and taken a crap all over Trafalgar Square in front of the BBC News 24 cameras.
“I’m worried about our lack of forward intelligence—” I start to say when Ramona interrupts.
“Going invisible in three, two, one, now,” she announces. “And going vertical, now.”
The undead cetacean ghosts scream in existential agony as our vehicle tips back and shudders, very slightly. Then a couple of virtual me’s of acceleration land heavily on my lap. I hope she knows what she’s doing, and cleared restricted airspace before she pulled that stunt. It would be worse than embarrassing to trigger an airprox investigation: London is slap bang in the middle of some of the densest air traffic in the world, and the Civil Aviation Authority is a sister agency of ours. The shuddering diminishes slightly, the roar of wind just beyond the edge of the hull rises, and the sky outside the not-windows slowly darkens as the metropolis drops away beneath us.
“Above flight level six hundred we’re out of controlled airspace,” our pilot explains. “There’s nothing to butt heads with except drones and the odd RAF Typhoon, and we can outrun them all.”
“Please tell me you’re not going to go supersonic?”
“Too late.” She sounds smug.
Shit. “The paperwork’s all yours, then.” The moaning and clicking from the ghost engine behind us is threatening to give me a headache. I can feel Lecter stirring in his case, irritated and disturbed. “Last time the RAF scrambled to intercept an airliner they broke windows across three counties—”
“Relax, we’re way too high for that. All they’ll hear is distant summer thunder. Beginning descent and deceleration in six minutes.”
Six minutes? But Manchester is nearly three hundred kilometers north of London! I glance around the interior of the shiny trade bauble that BLUE HADES have loaned us, along with a chauffeur to put it through its paces, then I think back to the diplomatic reception on the oil platform in the North Sea. Right. I’m just a woman from a tribe of Neolithic dug-out canoe builders, being gi
ven her first ride in an outboard motor boat. Maybe there is a message here? Perhaps BLUE HADES simply thought we were getting slightly too cocky and needed a low-key reminder of who owns 75 percent of our planet’s surface area . . .
“I’m not getting a satphone signal.” Officer Friendly speaks through a voice filter: it lends him a robotic, slightly menacing tone.
“Can’t punch radio waves through the plasma sheath while we’re hypersonic. Don’t worry, we’ll be down at street level again in just a few minutes.” Ramona sounds distracted.
“What are we walking into?” I ask, trying to keep a lid on my anxiety. We’re cut off from base, our analysts don’t have full access to the Police National Computer network anyway, and we didn’t have time for a full briefing; after what happened at the Library I’m feeling very twitchy. “Jim, what do you know?”
“The Deputy Chief said it was kicking off in Oldham. It started with a previously scheduled EDL demonstration and an Anti-Fascist Action counter-demo; nothing unusual, but it brewed up larger than expected, then turned ugly. Then the Major Incident kicked off—confirmed superpower involvement. Officers injured, extensive property damage, civilian demonstrators injured, an ambulance crew hurt and their vehicle destroyed.”
“Shit,” says Mhari. My thought exactly.
Jim continues: “We need more intel. We can’t go in blind in a situation like this, we could easily make things much worse. So the first thing to do is to go find the incident commander and get briefed.”
“Yes, absolutely,” I agree. “Ramona, we need to set down somewhere so we can get a sitrep. How long—”
“I’m hauling ass to get us there as fast as I can,” she says, just slightly reproachfully. “I can land us within a mile of Oldham center. Hmm. There’s a good-looking football ground not far from there, and it’s a weekday so the car park shouldn’t be full . . .”
The Annihilation Score Page 21