The Annihilation Score (2 page)

MORNING AFTER

Business trips: I hate them.

Actually,
hatred
is too mild an emotion to encapsulate how I feel about my usual run-of-the-mill off-site work-related travel.
Fear and loathing
comes closer; I only ever get sent places when things have gotten so out of control that they need a troubleshooter. Or trouble-violinist. My typical business trips are traumatic and horrible, and leave me with nightmares and a tendency to startle at loud noises for weeks afterwards, not to mention an aversion to newspapers and TV reports on horrible incidents in far-off places. Bob is used to this. He does a wonderful job of keeping the home fires burning, providing warm cocoa and iced Scotch on demand, and over the years he's even learned to pretend to listen. (He's not very
good
at it, mind, but the gesture counts. And, to be fair, he has his own demons to wrestle with.)

But anyway: not long ago, for the first time in at least two years, I got sent on a job that didn't require me to confront
oh God, please make them stop eating the babies' faces
but instead required me to attend committee meetings in nice offices, and even a couple of
diplomatic receptions. So I went shopping for a little black dress and matching shoes and accessories. Then I splashed out on a new suit I could also use for work after I got back. And then I got to do the whole cocktail-hour-at-the-embassy thing for real.

Cocktail hour at the embassy consisted of lots of charming men and women in suits and LBDs drinking Buck's Fizz and being friendly to one another, and
so what
if half of them had gill slits and dorsal fins under the tailoring, and the embassy smelled of seaweed because it was on an officially derelict oil rig in the middle of the North Sea, and the Other Side has the technical capability to exterminate every human being within two hundred kilometers of a coastline if they think we've violated the Benthic Treaty? It was
fun
. It was an officially sanctioned
party
. I was not there because my employers thought someone or something vile might need killing: I was there to add a discreet hint of muscle under the satin frock at a diplomatic reception in honor of the renewal of the non-aggression treaty between Her Majesty's Government and Our Friends The Deep Ones (also known as BLUE HADES).

The accommodation deck was a little utilitarian of course, even though they'd refitted it to make the Foreign Office Xenobiology staffers feel a bit more at home. And there was a baby grand piano in the hospitality suite, although nobody was playing it (which was a good thing because it meant nobody asked me if I'd like to accompany the pianist on violin, so I didn't have to explain that Lecter was indisposed because he was sleeping off a heavy blood meal in the locker under my bed).

In fact, now that I think about it, the entire week on the rig was almost entirely news-free and music-free.

And I didn't have any nightmares.

I'm still a bit worried about just why I got this plum of a job at such short notice, mind you. Gerry said he needed me to stand in for Julie Warren, who has somehow contracted pneumonia and is
hors de combat
thereby. But with 20/20 hindsight, my nasty suspicious mind suggests that maybe Strings Were Pulled. The charitable
interpretation is that someone in HR noticed that I was a little overwrought—Bob left them in no doubt about
that
after the Iranian business, bless his little drama-bunny socks—but the uncharitable interpretation . . . well, I'll get to that in a bit. Let's just say that if I'd known I was going to run into Ramona, I might have had second thoughts about coming.

So, let's zoom in on the action, shall we?

It was Wednesday evening. We flew out to the embassy on Tuesday, and spent the following day sitting around tables in breakout groups discussing fisheries quotas, responsibility for mitigating leaks from deep-sea oil drilling sites, leasing terms for right-of-way for suboceanic cables, and liaison protocols for resolving disputes over inadvertent territorial incursions by ignorant TV production crews in midget submarines—I'm not making that bit up, you wouldn't believe how close James Cameron came to provoking World War Three. We were due to spend Thursday in more sessions and present our consensus reports on ongoing future negotiations to the ambassadors on Friday morning, before the ministers flew in to shake flippers and sign steles on the current renewal round. But on Wednesday we wrapped up at five. Our schedule gave us a couple hours to decompress and freshen up, and then there was to be a cocktail reception hosted by His Scaliness, the Ambassador to the United Kingdom from BLUE HADES.
*

These negotiations weren't just a UK/BH affair; the UK was leading an EU delegation, so we had a sprinkling of diplomats from just about everywhere west of the Urals. (Except Switzerland, of course.) It was really a professional mixer, a meet-and-greet for the two sides. And that's what I was there for.

I'm not really a diplomat, except in the sense of the term understood by General von Clausewitz. I don't really know anything about fisheries quotas or liaison protocols. What I was there to do was show
off my pretty face in a nice frock under the nose of the BLUE HADES cultural attaché, who would then recognize me and understand the significance of External Assets detaching me from my regular circuit of
fuck I didn't know they exploded like water balloons is that green stuff blood
to attend a polite soirée.

But drinking dilute bubbly and partying, for middle-aged values of partying (as Bob would put it), is a pleasant change of pace: I could get used to it. So picture me standing by the piano with a tall drink, listening to a really rather charming Chief Superintendent (on detached duty with the fisheries folks, out of uniform) spin sardonic stories about the problems he's having telling honest trawlermen from Russian smugglers and Portuguese fisheries pirates, when I suddenly realize I'm
enjoying
myself, if you ignore the spot on the back of my right ankle where my shoe is rubbing—picture me totally
relaxed
, in the moment right before reality sandbags me.

“Mo?” I hear, in a musical, almost liquid mezzo-soprano, rising on a note of excitement: “Is that really
you
?”

I begin to turn because something about the voice is tantalizingly familiar if unwelcome, and I manage to fix my face in a welcoming smile just in time because the speaker
is
familiar. “Ramona?” It's been seven years. I keep smiling. “Long time no see!” At this moment I'd be happier if it was fourteen years. Or twenty-one.

“Mo, it
is
you! You look wonderful,” she enthuses.

“Hey, you're looking good yourself,” I respond on autopilot while I try to get my pulse back under control. And it's true, because she
is
looking splendid. She's wearing a backless, gold lamé fishtail number that clings in all the right places to emphasize her supermodel-grade bone structure and make me feel underdressed and dowdy. That she's got ten years on me doesn't hurt either. Eyes of blue, lips with just the right amount of femme fatale gloss, hair in an elaborate chignon: she's trying for the mermaid look, I see. How appropriate. There's just a hint of gray to her skin, and—of course—the sharklike gill slits betwixt collar bones and throat, to give away the fact that it's not just a fashion statement. That, and the sky-high thaum field she's giving
off: she's working a class four glamour, or I'll eat my corsage.
*
“I heard you were transitioning?”

She waves it off with a swish of a white kidskin opera glove. “We have ways of arresting or delaying the change. I can still function up here for a while. But within another two years I'll need a walker or a wheelchair all the time, and I can't pass in public anymore.” Her eyebrows furrow minutely, telegraphing irritation. I peer at her. (Are those tiny translucent scales?) “So I decided to take this opportunity for a last visit.” She takes a tiny step, swaying side-to-side as if she's wearing seven-inch stilettos: but of course she isn't, and where the train of her dress pools on the floor it conceals something other than feet. “How have you been? I haven't heard anything from you or Bob for ages.”

For a brief moment she looks wistful, fey, and just very slightly vulnerable. I remind myself that I've got nothing against her: really, my instinctive aversion is just a side effect of the overwhelming intimidatory power of her glamour, which in turn is a cosmetic rendered necessary by her unfortunate medical condition. To find yourself trapped in a body with the wrong gender must be hard to bear: How much harsher to discover, at age thirty, that you're the wrong species?

“Life goes on,” I say, with a light shrug. I glance at Mr. Fisheries Policeman to invite him to stick around, but he nods affably and slithers away in search of canapés and a refill for his glass of bubbly. “In the past month Bob has acquired a cat, a promotion, and a committee.” (A committee where he's being run ragged by the Vampire Bitch from Human Resources, a long-ago girlfriend-from-hell who has returned from the dead seemingly for the sole purpose of making his life miserable.) “As for me, I'm enjoying myself here. Slumming it among the upper classes.” I catch myself babbling and throw on the brakes. “Taking life easy.”

“I hear things,” Ramona says sympathetically. “The joint defense coordination committee passes stuff on. I have a—what passes for
a—desk. It'd all be very familiar to you, I think, once you got used to my people. They're very—” She pauses. “I was going to say
human
, but that's not exactly the right word, is it? They're very
personable
. Cold-blooded and benthic, but they metabolize oxygen and generate memoranda all the same, just like any other bureaucratic life form. After a while you stop noticing the scales and tentacles and just relate to them as folks. But anyway: we hear things. About the Sleeper in the Pyramid and the Ancient of Days and the game of nightmares in Highgate Cemetery. And you have my deepest sympathy, for what it's worth.
Prosit.
” She raises her champagne flute in salute.

“Cheers.” I take a sip of Buck's Fizz and focus on not displaying my ignorance. I am aware of the Sleeper and the Ancient, but . . . “Highgate Cemetery?”

“Oops.” Fingers pressed to lips, her perfectly penciled eyebrows describe an arch: “Pretend you didn't hear that? Your people have it in hand, I'm sure you'll be briefed on it in due course.” Well, perhaps I will be: but my skin is crawling. Ramona knows too much for my peace of mind, and she's too professional for this to be an accidental disclosure: she's letting it all hang out on purpose.
Why?
“Listen, you really ought to come and visit some time. My ma—people—are open to proposals for collaboration, you know. ‘The time is right,' so to speak. For collaboration. With humans, or at least their agencies.”

The thing about Ramona is, she's a professional in the same line of work as me and thee. She's an old hand: formerly an OCCINT asset enchained by the Black Chamber, now cut loose and reunited with the distaff side of her family tree—the inhuman one. She is proven by her presence here this evening to be a player in the game of spies, squishy-versus-scaly subplot, sufficiently trusted by BLUE HADES that they're willing to parade her around in public. She must have given them extraordinarily good reasons to trust her, such excellent reasons that I am now beginning to think that uninviting her to my wedding all those years ago was a strategic mistake. Time to rebuild damaged bridges, I think.

“Yes, we really ought to do lunch some time soon,” I say. “We could talk about, oh, joint fisheries policy or something.”

“Yes, that. Or maybe cabbages and kings, and why there are so many superheroes in the news this week?”

“Movies?” My turn to raise an eyebrow: “I know they were all the rage in Hollywood—”

She frowns, and I suddenly realize I've missed an important cue. “Don't be obtuse, Mo.” She takes another carefully measured sip of champagne: I have to admire her control, even if I don't much like being around her because of what her presence reminds me of. “Three new outbreaks last week: one in London, one in Manchester, and one in Merthyr Tydfil. That last one would be Cap'n Coal, who, let me see, ‘wears a hard hat and tunnels underground to pop up under the feet of dog-walkers who let their pooches foul the pavement.'” She smacks her lips with fishy amusement. “And then there was the bonded warehouse robbery at Heathrow that was stopped by Officer Friendly.” I blink, taken aback.

“I haven't been following the news,” I admit. “I spent the past few weeks getting over jet lag.”
Jet lag
is a euphemism, like an actor's
resting
between theatrical engagements.

“Was that your business trip to Vakilabad?”

Her eyes widen as I grab her wrist. “Stop.
Right now.
” Her pupils are not circular; they're vertical figure eights, an infinity symbol stood on end. I feel as if I'm falling into them, and the ward on my discreet silver necklace flares hot. My grip tightens.