The Annihilation Score (25 page)

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 . . .”

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've 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 given 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 . . .”

Oh God.
I can just see the headlines:
Superhero team touches down between goal posts at Old Trafford: Pitch ruined
. I take a white-knuckled grip on my armrests as the doleful wailing of doomed dolphins lowers in pitch and the straps tighten around my torso. We're going in: un-trained, un-drilled, un-practiced, un-briefed,
and we're not even the right team
. We don't have a catchy name, an origin story, or matching underwear. The probability of this turning into an utter, irremediable clusterfuck approaches unity.

I close my eyes and hope the others don't pick up on my nerves. Because I have a terrible premonition that things are going to get a
lot
worse, before there's any chance whatsoever of them getting better.

*   *   *

Eight minutes after departure we land in the car park of the Werneth mosque, just across Manchester Street from Werneth Park in Oldham. The sky is slate gray, a cold drizzle is falling, and a pall of smoke rises above the houses and shops to our north. The car park is littered with half-bricks and broken bottles; the only
reason the mosque's windows aren't smashed is the bars protecting them. A convoy of police vans are parked nose-to-tail on the main road, sliding doors open and mesh screens deployed across their windshields. The distant roar of an angry crowd drifts across from further up the road, in the direction of the city center: they're chanting loud slogans, something ugly about Muslims. Other voices rise against them in counterpoint with another chant. Two tribes, trying to drown each other out. Or, given the weather, trying to provoke the other side into opening their mouths wide enough to drown in the rain.

A mobile police command center is parked in front of the mosque, obviously positioned to send a message to any hotheads who get too carried away—and also because the mosque is surrounded by high spiked railings and brick walls. Neighborhood relations here clearly leave something to be desired.

When we arrive, the incident commander (a regular Superintendent) is calmly speaking into a Tetra headset while the staff of the command center direct mobile units around the high-detail maps on their computer screens. There are other screens displaying the camera feed from the helicopter overhead and a handful of camera vans. “Where is he now?” asks the Super. “Good. Try to keep him there. I'll have more resources for you shortly.” She ends the call and stares at us. “What took you so long?”