The Annihilation Score

by Charles Stross

  Jim scans the room slowly. “Not yet.” There are about forty people present so far, with more arriving steadily. I think I recognize one: she looks vaguely like Persephone the Auditor, if I squint and try to imagine how she would look in a couture gown with her hair scraped back and lacquered until it gleams.

  “I’m not sure,” I say. “Got one possible, but she’s one of ours.”

  “I’ve got another,” Jim says quietly. “Not a POI, I’m afraid: she’s an Assistant Commissioner in the Met. And my boss’s boss.”

  That rank might sound junior, but it actually puts her three levels above Jim, a Brigadier to his Colonel. I briefly wonder if we’ve blundered into a black tie version of The Man Who Was Thursday, updated for a new century. “Might be best to avoid her,” I propose, gently steering him away from the direction he was scanning. Arm in arm, we slowly pace the length of a stupefyingly high glass wall. “This whole meet-and-greet for superpowers thing might have worked out a lot better if the Sheikh hadn’t specified black tie. They don’t exactly stand out when they’re not wearing skintight Lycra with capes, do they?”

  “Indeed not.” We reach the corner and turn. “Uh-oh.” Approaching us from the other wall is the woman Jim zeroed in on, in conversation with a distinguished-looking fellow with a white goatee and thick glasses. She looks to be about my age, wearing a rather plain dark blue evening dress.

  “Ah, I thought I recognized you!” she says to Jim. To me, a brief pro forma smile. “Hello. I’m Jim’s boss’s boss. Laura Stanwick.” She extends a hand.

  We shake. “This must be matrix management central then, because Jim is working part-time for me,” I tell her.

  “Oh?” She suddenly focuses on me like a hawk. “Then you must be Dr. O’Brien.” I let go of her hand. “I’ve read a lot of reports about you,” she says drily, “not much of it negative.”

  “Thank you . . .”

  “Shame they’ve thrown you in the piranha tank at the deep end,” she says. Another brief smile. “Good show yesterday.” She turns to Jim, implicitly dismissing me: “Jim, we need to talk about implementation of the plan some time next week. It’s imperative that we move forward with all due speed.”

  “Um, yes, ma’am.” Jim casts me a worried glance. “Can this wait until Monday?”

  “I suppose it’ll have to.” She glances at me. “See you around! Can’t stay, must circulate. Toodle-pip.” She collects White Goatee, who is swaying slightly and contemplating his nearly empty wine glass. “Come along, dear.”

  Jim stares after her. “Well, I never.”

  “Never what?” I take his arm. “Surprised to learn that Assistant Commissioners are married?”

  “No . . .” He trails off. “But I hope she hasn’t gotten the wrong end of the stick about us. Here, let’s circulate. We’ll never know if anyone interesting is here if we pretend to be wallflowers.”

  Suddenly I realize that I am standing far too close to the glass, and I am backlit, making me a perfect sniper target. I take three long steps sideways, then look round furtively as I tug my gown back into place. “Sorry,” I say.

  Jim looks concerned. “You’re very twitchy tonight.”

  “I left my violin in the safe. Old security reflexes . . . let’s stay away from the walls from now on?”

  We circulate for what feels like the best part of an hour, while we drain our wine glasses. We pass the woman I suspect of being an Auditor once more, but she’s so elaborately made-up that it might be her evil twin, and in any case she gives no sign of recognizing me. Nobody is casting fireballs or levitating or crushing coal into diamonds. It’s just a very boring reception for the sorts of movers and shakers that a moderately anglophile Sheikh might invite round for a Saturday night’s entertainment.

  “This is crap,” I confide in Jim’s ear around the time my glass is empty and my feet are beginning to ache from the hardwood floor.

  “Want to split?” he whispers back.

  “Yes.” I lean on his arm. “If we’d got the database up and running and had a contact sheet memorized, this might have been useful, but as it is we’re a couple of weeks too early . . . get me out of here?”

  Jim sends a text, and the long black beetle-shiny limo is waiting for us at the end of the red runner when we arrive at the bottom of the lift shaft. Everything about the Shard is calculated to make you feel bug-on-a-microscope-slide small: the celebrity perp walk down the carpet seems to take forever, and for some reason—too many glossy magazines, I suppose—I keep a fixed grin on my face the whole way. I’m falling into an acting role again, rather than being myself as I was for a few hours in Jim’s presence. Then I feel his strength through his arm and I snap back into my own head: only now I have an impulse to lift my shoulders and stick my chest out and tap my heels as I walk, because Jim is magnificent and he needs a glamorous catwalk companion, and I want to be the sort of glittering woman who belongs on his arm, because this sort of setting comes with a natural magical glamor of its own. Look at me! The smile feels natural as I tighten my grip on him. Then he opens the car door and hands me in.

  Once the door is closed, the car begins to move. “Where to?” he asks quietly. “I can take you home if you want.”

  I am intensely aware that we’re in the back of a limo together, on a slippery leather seat that slides half-flat. I’m still holding his hand, and I’m keeping myself from sliding down the seat mainly by digging in one heel and bending my knee so that it pushes into view. I’m not wearing the lace stockings I picked for Bob: no, I chose sheer black silk for tonight. Suddenly I feel very wicked. “I want you to take me home,” I tell him, taking his hand and tugging it across to rest on my knee. “But you choose the route—fast or slow.” Then I lean towards him and he kisses me.

  * * *

  I don’t know how long we spend in the back of the limo. Time flies by when you’re having fun. On the other hand: we’re in a car. And kissing and cuddling is all very well, but I’m still a bundle of unresolved internal conflict and zinging energy. I haven’t completely lost my grip on myself. I want to have fun, damn it: I’ve had precious little in the past month. But an icy-cold part of me also wants to be able to go to work on Monday and look my co-workers in the eye. Nor am I quite certain I’m ready to give up on Bob for good. The self-doubt finally prompts me to cool things a little: Jim follows my lead because, I suspect, he, too, is mature enough to realize the consequences if we take this to its logical end point. One-night stands with co-workers are so not my thing—so we pause on the threshold, and I don’t invite him in with me when the car pulls up outside my front door.

  “Thank you for a wonderful evening,” I tell him with heartfelt gratitude as I pull my shoes on.

  “No, thank you.” He pauses. “I was not expecting this turn of events. I mean it.” He sounds slightly shaky. “I’m touched.”

  “Well,” I say awkwardly. We kiss again. “I need to get my head around it, Jim. It’s been a wonderful evening but I don’t know if it will still be wonderful if we go too fast—”

  “Well then, we shouldn’t do that,” he says, as level-headed as I could hope for. “Talk tomorrow?”

  “Definitely,” I say, then before I’m tempted to change my mind and invite him in I climb out of the car and walk to my house alone. Part of me is kicking myself for not throwing caution to the winds, but I’ve got a lot of questions to answer before our next date, up to and including whether I want to try and salvage my marriage first. And something tells me I won’t have very long to think about it.

  * * *

  I go upstairs and shed my glamorous mirror-world skin, then crawl into bed alone—except for Spooky, who parks herself precariously on the footboard and stares at me with huge dark eyes. Bloody cat, trying to psych me out.

  I fall asleep and dream, of course. And it should come as no surprise at all that it’s a classic anxiety dream, bubbling up from my
conflicted lonely subconscious. I dream that I’m walking through the darkened streets of London, some time in the early hours of the morning. It’s cool and it’s been raining recently and a chill wind raises gooseflesh on my bare skin—naked because this is the classic anxiety dream, the one where you’re in the nude and everyone else is wearing clothes.

  A voice I know only I can hear is calling me, telling me to catch the tube: if I don’t, I’ll be late home, late reaching safety and security. (Which is silly because the tube shuts down at 1 a.m. and the traction power stays off until the first trains start running again shortly before 6 a.m., but dreams don’t have to make logical sense.)

  So I scuttle between darkened doorways, avoiding masses of wind-strewn litter and the odd sleeping homeless person: heart-in-mouth I cross Whetstone Park, tiptoe up Gate Street in the dark. Two police officers on foot patrol walk past on the opposite side, certain to see the naked woman crouched in the doorway—but they look right past me and keep on going. In this dream I am naked but I have the middle-aged woman’s unwanted superpower of social invisibility. What kind of sense does that make? Dream logic.

  This is definitely a dream, because in real life you would not catch me walking the streets naked after dark. Nor would I carefully descend the dozen or so steps to the gates of a locked tube station. I slip through the barrier, then chain the gate shut behind me. The escalators are stilled for the night: their metal steps are sharp and cold under my feet as I descend in near darkness. I’ve got a feeling, an urge, that the compass in my skull is telling me to proceed to a familiar platform. Platform Five. Aldwych branch, the other nagging strand of my unsolved-cases anxiety. I walk along the short platform until I come to the end. The signals are set to red and the track power turned off, but I still shudder. Something scuttles and moves in the tunnel entrance: tube mice.

  I cross the warning barrier at the end of the platform and climb down onto the track bed. My feet ache continuously now, for I’ve been abusing them constantly for hours—shiny new heels, then barefoot on the street. I walk into the tunnel.

  ***Help.*** It’s the still, small voice of my demon lover, my muse, my curse, my destiny, floating in the darkness in front of me. It’s Lecter: abducted and abused, held hostage by strange powers that want to tie him to a new bearer.

  I stumble and shuffle along through the darkened tunnel for an infinitely long time. Track ballast scratches at my feet; when I slip, I catch myself on the cold, rough brick and cast-iron lining of the wall. I walk past rows of arched recesses, survival trenches for tube workers. In my dream they serve as niches in an ossuary, each one filled by the on-end coffin of a plague pit burial, open to reveal their occupant’s final deathly grimace. Heavy cables snake alongside at ankle level, secured to racks bolted to the walls. Anxiety dream redux: my subconscious couldn’t frighten me with naked-on-the-streets-of-London, so it’s iterated through loss-anxiety to a healthy dose of siderodromophobia.

  ***Beware.***

  For some time now the tunnel has been descending and curving to the right. It’s dark as a night with the new moon riding low, only the odd emergency light and signal showing me the way forward—the relatively bright platform is lost in the distance behind me. But I have walked past a points signal repeater, and can just make out something irregular and metallic at ground level. I touch the wall. It feels different, smoother. I run my finger along it, walking slowly forward until it roughens again perhaps ten meters further along the tunnel.

  ***Back up,*** says the voice in my head.

  I back up obediently, and then I trip over something hard and cold at ankle level. I catch myself as I tumble, and then I am no longer walking along a tube tunnel. This is a wider corridor, with a wooden floor and scuffed tan-painted walls, doors opening off to either side. It’s clearly backstage at a theater or performing venue of some kind: it curves, and—

  I am in one of the side rooms. It’s an instrument store, with stands and piles of cases full of orchestral equipment—the instruments that don’t usually go home with their owners. Here a row of kettle drums, there a wooden cabinet full of tambourines, triangles, and other minor items.

  ***Over here!*** calls the quiet voice, and behind a row of stacked wooden chairs I find a familiar battered white violin case. My heart pounds as I reach out and take it, and then I am clutching his case in front of me (as if it’s adequate concealment!) while I shiver on a floodlit stage in front of a full house, a very familiar house. It’s the Royal Albert Hall, and I’m on stage wearing only my gooseflesh-raised skin, and every seat is full, the audience staring at me accusingly. Their faces are pale, indistinguishable blobs that seem to hover in the twilight, somewhere between the collars of their uniform shirts and the brims of their custody helmets.

  ***If the lead violin would care to take her seat?*** The conductor is gently sarcastic as he chides me in Lecter’s borrowed tones. There is a throne—no other word is fit to describe it—at the center of the stage, below the organ, where the soloist would normally stand. This being Lecter’s dream I might have expected monstrous charnel furniture assembled from interlocking bones: but as I shuffle backwards towards it (violin case still clutched defensively between my body and the silently staring disapproval of the audience of faceless officers), I realize it is made of thousands of stacked police notebooks. ***We are waiting for the lead violin,*** the conductor explains to the audience.

  I am nearly at the throne of evidence when I realize that the violin is no longer in his case: I’m carrying him in one hand and the bow in the other, and there’s something wrong. A body in blue steps forward, shadows skeletally grinning under his helmet as with bony hands he positions a manuscript on the monstrous music stand that sits before the violin soloist’s throne. I know that score: I’ve performed it a dozen times in my dreams over the weeks since the British Library robbery.

  I see the conductor’s face for the first time: or rather, I don’t, because I recognize him from his absence, and he’s in the high security lock-up at Belgravia where we put him after the takedown on Downing Street, isn’t he?

  “You can’t make me do it!” I shout as I throw Lecter’s bow at the Mandate.

  Lights snap on overhead, a concussive blast of photons that scorch the back of my eyelids. I cower and cover my face with one arm. Figures step forward out of the photorhodopsin-stained backdrop: two in front, two closing in behind me. Daft Punk Territorial Support Group Judge Dredd Empty Uniforms—the uniforms Ramona had designed for my people—close in around me, raising power-assisted gloves that contain no human fingers. The Naked Woman versus the Empty Suits.

  “You’re nicked!” The uniforms chant in unison as they grab me and twist my arms painfully behind my back. I can’t breathe. They ratchet a pair of handcuffs closed around my wrists, zip-lock my ankles together, drop a bag over my head, and lift me to shoulder level. I’m suffocating as I open my mouth to scream: but there is no air here, just a tongueful of warm fur.

  With an angry chirrup, Spooky plants a surprisingly cold pad on my cheek and stands up, flexing her claws. I realize I’m lying alone between damp, chilly sheets, breathless and heart pounding in the wake of a suffocation nightmare. I resolve never to complain about Spooky sleeping on my face again, then I get out of bed and go downstairs to check the wards on Lecter’s safe.

  Because you can never be too careful.

  * * *

  Sunday is as Sunday does: I spend it prosaically, catching up on housework chores and trying not to ask myself whether what I feel for Jim has the potential to turn serious. This is, of course, like trying not to think about green elephants: once you start consciously trying to avoid it, it becomes impossible. So I pop a sleeping pill at bedtime, and it is a distinct relief when Monday morning rolls around and I can dive back into a distracting office.

  The first thing I do when I get to my room is to park Lecter in the securely warded safe. Then I fire off an email to
Dr. Armstrong, asking if he has a spare hour. To my surprise, he gets back to me right away: this lunchtime is available. So that corner of my diary is penciled in for a chat about these dreams I’ve been having—and by extension, about Lecter—and other, more worrying things.

  Last week I decreed that from today we’d be starting up regular Monday morning management meetings, just to keep all department heads in the loop. The Unit—with an effort I remind myself that we’re now officially a Force—is big enough that we have to crawl out of the Precambrian jellyfish swamp of bottom-up organizational structure and grow a management backbone. I don’t know everything that’s going on anymore, and although I know all the names and faces of the people working under me, there’s no way I can stay in touch with what they do. Ergo, delegation, and the bane of management that ensues: endless meetings.

  For now the meeting team consists of Ramona, Mhari, Jim, and myself: so we hold it in my office over coffee and it’s blessedly short. It’s going to change soon enough, though—I can see the writing on the wall.

  I get my first surprise of the day when I ask, “Do we have any other business?”

  Jim nods: “Yes, I got a memo via the Home Office. It’s about the inaccessible tube station—BTP got a resolution, it turns out there’s some other agency involved. Aldwych has been shut for years anyway, and apparently TfL agreed to transfer it to this other agency on a five-year lease without telling anyone, including the on-site guards.” His cheek twitches.