The Annihilation Score (28 page)

“You'd better
make
time. If this was your organization's first outing, you
might
be able to roll over it, or not: but it all depends on whether the Home Secretary is feeling merciful and how the press spin things in tomorrow's broadsheets. At least Officer Friendly is on
the books, and tackling that tanked-up chav is going to earn credit in the right places.”

“We'd better head back for London,” I say tiredly.

Mhari sniffs. “Ramona can drive. Officer Friendly took off a couple of hours ago under his own power.”

“You go.” Alice shakes her head. “I'll walk you to the car park. Oh, and we haven't had this conversation. Understand?”

“Absolutely,” I say.

“Yes,” agrees Mhari.

“Good. Because if we had accidentally discussed ways of working around an Independent Police Complaints Commission investigation, that would be very bad indeed—for all of us.”

And that's how our superhero team's first clash with the forces of evil comes to an end.

*   *   *

It's after eleven at night by the time Ramona, having driven out of town in her white van camouflage, takes us up into the starry vastness of the stratosphere while the abyssal ghosts hoot and trill in existential pain behind us. We blaze a cometary course southeast before descending somewhere north of the M25 to drive back into town along the A1 in dug-out canoe mode. Consequently, we don't slither and slide into the car park until shortly after midnight.

As soon as the hatch dilates, my smartphone beeps repeatedly, announcing a slew of messages. “Wait,” I say. The very first one I glance at is an SMS from Dr. Armstrong.
See me in your office as soon as you arrive. Bring everyone who is traveling with you.
“Damn.”

“What?” says Mhari.

“We're meeting the Auditors, upstairs, right now.”

“Shit.” It occurs to me that Mhari is getting just a tad repetitive: I resolve to find a way to tackle her about her language—but not right now.

“Do they want me, too?” Ramona sounds mildly anxious. It occurs to me to wonder if she's made the Auditors' acquaintance yet.

“Yes, they want all of us. Follow me,” I say, and I stumble tiredly towards the lift. I'm still wearing the borrowed sweats, violin in one hand and bagged-up remains of my second-best work suit in the other. I don't so much feel like I've been dragged backwards through a hedge as I feel like I've been stomped flat, chewed up, and spat out by the Cape buffalo that lives on the other side.

The lift door opens onto the twilit lobby. There is a trail of light leaking along the corridor from the boardroom doorway. My mouth tastes of ashes and I'm exhausted: I really don't feel up to another grilling today, but needs must. I slowly walk towards the inevitable reckoning.

I'm about to touch the door handle when someone opens it from the other side. “Ah, Dominique,” says the SA. His smile is polite but strained. “Do come in. And you, Ms. Murphy, Ms. Random.” He looks past us. “Chief Superintendent Grey is elsewhere? Excellent. Do make yourselves comfortable—”

“Yes, do,” echoes the silver-haired elder from the Audit Committee who confronted me the week before. “Please seal the room, Dr. Armstrong.”

They've brought food. My nostrils flare: the odor of pizza drifts from a stack of square boxes in the middle of the table. They've even brought drinks, or at least bottles of mineral water. I'm instantly on edge, scenting a setup. “I expect you've missed your tea,” says the Mouse Lady from the Audit Committee. (The only one who's not here is the woman named Persephone.) “Do sit down, ladies.” Her attempt at emulating domestic hospitality is a washout, I'm afraid: she's even less good at doing motherly than I am.

The SA paces the perimeter of the room, sprinkling white powder from a silvery Thermos flask. Mhari looks at me apprehensively, then takes a seat; Ramona rolls up beside her. “I don't understand,” I say, glancing at Dr. Armstrong.

“He's establishing a field-expedient grid,” says Silver-Hair. “Total privacy is required. In the meantime, feel free to tuck in; you must be famished. Oh, I nearly forgot.” He picks up a different thermally
insulated container, decorated with biohazard symbols. “This is for you, Ms. Murphy. I suggest you consume it within the next hour; it will be nonviable by tomorrow.”

I shudder and look away, suddenly nauseous.
Oh God, they did it. They went and
did
it.
PHANGs need a blood meal at least once every two weeks or their V-parasite runs wild. The trouble is, it has to be blood from another living human being. The commensal parasites that give them their superpowers, by way of the law of contagion, use the blood as a bridge into the brain of their victims—which they chew holes in. Blood is just a communications channel, not the meal itself, and V syndrome is a horrible neurodegenerative affliction I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy—similar to K syndrome, except at one remove. Hideous and terminal, and—

Mouse Woman notices me staring: “The donor is in a hospice, Dr. O'Brien, in the end stages of malignant melanoma. In this instance, she is already unconscious and will be dead of natural causes within twenty-four hours—she won't have time to suffer from V syndrome.”

Mhari gives me a guilty sidelong look, her shoulders hunched. I look away and swallow. My stomach rumbles and the pizza smells wonderful, but I don't feel right about dining at this table.

“Please go ahead and eat,” Mouse Woman tells me, a note of iron creeping into her voice. “This meeting is going to take some time.”

Damned if I do, damned if I don't. I can still taste the metallic strangeness of Mohammed Nasir's blood on my lips. (I spat and rinsed with bottled water but it doesn't seem to go away.) I pull the nearest box towards me and open it. Pineapple and mushroom and ham: doubly damned I am. I nibble on the edge of a slice as Dr. Armstrong repeats his circuit of the room, chanting quiet mnemonics in Old Enochian. He sketches a ward on the boardroom door, then connects a crude-looking black box to the salt trail using a ribbon cable, takes his seat at the table, and switches on an LED camping lantern. “Is everybody ready?” he asks.

I nod, mouth full. Mhari is sucking liquid through an opaque straw. Ramona shakes her head. “Not really,” she says quietly. She's
been unusually subdued since we came up here. I wonder if she knows how she's been set up?

“Tough.” The SA smiles humorlessly as he bends down and presses a button on the black box.

The office, and the faint traffic noises from outside, vanish.

We sit around a boardroom table floating atop a circle of carpet surrounded by total blackness, eating pizza and drinking blood. The only illumination is the SA's camping lantern.

“We have some questions for you,” says Dr. Armstrong. “One at a time. Starting with, precisely what happened between the time you left the car park below this building and the time you returned. In your own words, without compulsion. Mo, you first.” He raises his fingers and the quality of sound in the ward deadens until the only things I can hear are the Auditors and my own voice. (Great: they've put the others in a cone of silence.)

Fever-chills run up and down my spine. “What about Jim?” I ask.

“You have no need to know.” Mouse Woman's eyes are shadowed.

Oh dear.
“Well then.” I lick my lips. “Ramona led us to her vehicle, and then . . .”

It seems to take forever to tell the tale, but the Auditors listen patiently. Then they release Mhari from the cone of silence and ask her to recount her version of events. I'm allowed to listen in but not contribute: as their manager I may have to defend them later if they say anything inadvisable.

I cringe when she gets to the sequence where Officer Friendly broke into the taxi driver's backyard and found what Übermensch had done there. Disgusting doesn't begin to describe it. Stomach-churning? Yes. But his sadism was constrained in the end by his lack of imagination: it was vile but petty.

Mhari describes the events in the classroom at the mosque and our subsequent discussions with Superintendent Christie. She makes no attempt to dissemble or self-censor, which surprises me: I didn't know she'd encountered Dr. Armstrong and his colleagues in their professional capacity before, but her body language is totally cowed,
submissive.
Not
what one would expect from one of the self-identified lords and ladies who rule humanity from the shadows, setting interest rates and offering credit—not even what you'd expect from a vampire.

Finally it's Ramona's turn, but at this point she's pretty much just confirming what Mhari and I told the auditors. At the end, the Mouse Lady nods. “I believe your accounts are consistent,” she says. “Michael?”

“Yes,” the SA says slowly. “Yes, indeed. Dr. O'Brien”—he leans forward—“did you at any time see Chief Superintendent Grey? From the time you entered the basement to the time you arrived back here?”

Wait, what?
“Of course,” I say, confused. “He was sitting right behind me in the flying submarine—”

“I'm sorry, but I believe I have not made myself sufficiently clear. You have said that you saw Officer Friendly sitting behind you. Did you
at any point
see James Grey's face?”

“Whu-well!” I sit back, and glance at Ramona. She looks bewildered. “Well no, but he had his armor on the whole time. Why would I see his face?”

“Ms. Random, Ms. Murphy—did either of you see Chief Superintendent Grey? Or just a suit of armor?”

“Ulp.” Mhari pushes her biohazard container aside and licks her lips. They glisten black in the dim glow of the lantern. “I don't believe so,” she says hesitantly.

“It was definitely Jim in there!” Ramona insists. “I mean, he may use a voice distorter but his diction and body language . . . ?” She looks around the table uncertainly. “You're serious,” she says in a small voice.

“Didn't he say he couldn't get a satellite signal inside the flying sub?” asks Mhari.

“We only have his word for it,” I remind her. I look at the SA. “Are you serious?” I ask. “Do you really believe Jim wasn't inside that suit of armor?”

“I have heard no conclusive testimony to the effect that he
was
,” says Dr. Armstrong, “merely conjecture based on diction and body language.”

Oh god.
Officer Friendly was sitting behind me for the whole flight out.
Standing
behind me. Whoever was in that suit could have leaned forward and garroted me and I wouldn't have stood a chance.

“I do not believe you were in immediate danger,” the SA says calmly.

“We are merely investigating one low-probability contingency,” echoes the Mouse Woman. “That information received from a sister agency is of questionable accuracy.”

Silver-Hair leans back from the table and makes a steeple with his fingertips. “There are lessons to be learned,” he says.

I can't help myself: “What lessons?” I demand. “Which agency? Are the police lying to us? Do you think Jim Grey is a plant?”

“He's not—” begins Ramona.

“
Chief Superintendent Grey
is very definitely what he appears to be,” Dr. Armstrong interrupts. “The question is whether Officer Friendly is likewise.”

“But Officer Friendly is Jim Grey's superhero persona!” I protest.

“That's what Chief Superintendent Grey says,” agrees the Mouse Woman. “Certainly Chief Superintendent Grey wears Officer Friendly armor. Whether it is the only such suit of armor, however . . .”

“We think you should investigate further,” says the SA. He smiles. “What else?”

Silver-Hair clears his throat. “Your attestation ceremony as officers of the law was held in front of Woolwich Magistrates yesterday morning and noted accordingly by the clerk of court. The paperwork is on its way to you: try not to lose it. Ahem. An order in privy council will be issued tomorrow formally re-designating this organization as the Transhuman Police Coordination Force—there is common law precedent, and an amendment to the Serious Organized Crime and Police Act (2005) will be tabled in the next Parliamentary session to regularize it. This leaves the, ah, IPCC enquiry. I believe we can head it off at the pass once you can demonstrate that you were acting lawfully to stop an imminent threat to life.”

“Thank you for clarifying that,” I say tiredly. So the Auditors have an onside lawyer? What a surprise. “What else should we be doing?”

“Generally, we want you to keep on doing what you're already doing. With, perhaps, a little more structure.” The SA folds his arms. “Continue to solicit interviews with suitably solid citizens, and supervise their training and deployment. Collect forward intelligence on potentially disruptive superpower threats of three-sigma level and above.” He pauses. “You need to work out what story you're going to feed the public and media to explain where you came from, sooner rather than later. It'll need to be compatible with the global superpower origin cover we're developing, of course, but that shouldn't be too hard.” He pauses again. “And you might also want to investigate some sort of uniform or team costume.”

“Now wait a minute,” says Mhari, a gravelly snarl creeping into her voice, “if you think you're going to get me to wear spangly fishnets—”

“Not at all!” says the SA. “But”—he gestures at my bagged-up suit—“next time your clothes are ruined, you'll find it much easier to indent for a replacement if it's a uniform item rather than personal office attire.”

“Are we done here?” asks the Mouse Woman.

“Not quite.” Dr. Armstrong spares us a long look. “I want you to know that I'm proud of you; despite being inadequately briefed, not to mention trained, you did far better than we could reasonably have expected today. But in future”—he momentarily looks as if he's sucking on a lemon—“expect the worst. I'm afraid you won't be disappointed.”