The Annihilation Score Read online

  Ace Books by Charles Stross

  SINGULARITY SKY

  IRON SUNRISE

  ACCELERANDO

  THE ATROCITY ARCHIVES

  GLASSHOUSE

  HALTING STATE

  SATURN’S CHILDREN

  THE JENNIFER MORGUE

  WIRELESS

  THE FULLER MEMORANDUM

  RULE 34

  THE APOCALYPSE CODEX

  NEPTUNE’S BROOD

  THE RHESUS CHART

  THE ANNIHILATION SCORE

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  This book is an original publication of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Copyright © 2015 by Charles Stross.

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  ACE and the “A” design are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  For more information, visit penguin.com.

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-698-19525-7

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Stross, Charles.

  The annihilation score / Charles Stross.

  pages ; cm. — (A laundry files novel ; 6)

  ISBN 978-0-425-28117-8 (hardcover)

  1. Howard, Bob (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Intelligence service—Great Britain—Fiction. 3. Husband and wife—Fiction. 4. Women violinists—Fiction. 5. Demonology—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6119.T79A85 2015

  823'.92—dc23

  2015002026

  FIRST EDITION: July 2015

  Cover illustration by Larry Rostant.

  Cover design by Lesley Worrell.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  FOR MARTIN AND KIRSTY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Novelists don’t, surprisingly, work in a perfect vacuum, and when venturing out of our comfort zones we rely on the kindness and encouragement of others. As a boy growing up in Yorkshire in the 1970s, I lived in a Marvel- and DC Comics–devoid zone: aside from one memorable weekend’s exposure to a stack of imported comics in a leisure center, my total experience of the American superhero tradition was limited to the Adam West Batman series on Saturday-morning TV and (later) to the Superman movies. (Which is a big part of why, when Marvel came calling in 2005 and asked if I wanted to write scripts for Iron Man, I ended up turning them down: Tony Stark just isn’t my idea of a hero.) Yes, we had 2000 AD and Judge Dredd: but the world of comics in 1970s Great Britain was different, and where American readers got Wild Cards, we got Temps.

  Which is also why I’d like to thank the following people for their invaluable help and advice in kicking the tires on this novel when it was a work in progress, reassuring me when I was on target, and gently redirecting me when I was veering off track: Cat Valente, Seanan Maguire, Warren Ellis, John Rodgers, Aliette de Bodard, Jamais Cascio, Austin Grossman, Max Gladstone, Ben Aaronovitch, and (on the editorial side) Jenni Hill, Susan Allison, Caitlin Blasdell, and Marty Halpern.

  I’d also like to thank my army of regular test-readers, including (but not limited to): Trey Palmer, Hugh Hancock, Phil Dyson, Soon Lee, Nelson Cunningham, Marcus Rowland, Beth Friedman, Andrew Adams, Dan Ritter, Stephen Harris, Tara Glover, Colette Bellingham, and Harry Payne.

  Finally, I’d like to thank my previous editor at Ace Books in New York, Ginjer Buchanan, who retired in March 2013. She acquired my first novel, Singularity Sky, back in 2001 and had edited my work ever since; and I’d like to thank my new editor, Susan Allison, for making the transition as smooth as possible.

  CONTENTS

  Ace Books by Charles Stross

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  PART 1: ORIGIN STORY

  1: PROLOGUE: THE INCORRIGIBLES

  2: MORNING AFTER

  3: THE FOURTH WALL

  4: BRIEFINGS

  5: THE OFFICE

  6: AN EXCITABLE BOY

  PART 2: THE SORTING ALGORITHM OF EVIL

  7: OFFICER FRIENDLY

  8: UNAVOIDABLE CONSEQUENCES

  9: TEAM OF CHAMPIONS

  10: GREAT PAY AND BENEFITS! APPLY HERE!

  11: BATTLE WITHOUT HONOR OR HUMANITY

  12: END OF THE LINE

  PART 3: “GOOD HEAVENS, MISS SAKAMOTO! YOU’RE BEAUTIFUL!”

  13: CAPTIVATION

  14: INFECTED

  15: FRESH MEAT

  16: DEMOCRACY IN ACTION

  17: A NIGHT AT THE OPERA

  18: CASSILDA’S SONG

  19: THE KING IN YELLOW

  PART 1

  ORIGIN STORY

  1.

  PROLOGUE: THE INCORRIGIBLES

  Please allow me to introduce myself . . .

  No. Strike that. Period stop backspace backspace bloody computer no stop that stop listening stop dictating end end oh I give up.

  Will you stop doing that?

  Starting all over again (typing this time: it’s slower, but dam speech recognition and auto-defect to Heckmondwike):

  * * *

  My husband is sometimes a bit slow on the uptake; you’d think that after ten years together he’d have realized that our relationship consisted of him, me, and a bone-white violin made for a Mad Scientist by a luthier-turned-necromancer. But no: the third party in our ménage à trois turns out to be a surprise to him after all these years, and he needs more time to think about it.

  Bending over backwards to give him the benefit of the doubt, this has only become an issue since my husband acquired the ability to see Lecter—that’s what I call my violin when I argue with him*—for what he is. (He. She. It. Whatever.) Bob is very unusual in having lately developed this ability: it marks him as a member of a privileged elite, the select club of occult practitioners who can recognize what they’re in the presence of and stand fast against it rather than fleeing screaming into the night. Like the Vampire Bitch from Human Resources, and what was she doing in the living room at five o’clock in the morning—?

  Issues. Vampires, violins, and marital miscommunications. I’m going off-topic again, aren’t I? Time out for tea!

  * * *

  Take three.

  Hello.

  My name is Mo; that’s short for Dominique O’Brien. I’m forty-three years old, married to a man who calls himself Bob Howard, aged thirty-eight and a quarter. We are currently separated while we try to sort things out—things including, but not limited to: my relationship with my violin, his relationship with the Vampire Bitch from Human Resources, and the End Of The World As We Know It (which is an ongoing work-related headache).

  This is my introduction to my work journal during OPERATION INCORRIGIBLE, and the period immediately before and after it. We’re supposed to keep these journals in order to facilitate institutional knowledge retention in event of our death in the line of duty. And if you are reading it, you are probably a new Laundry recruit and I am probably not on hand to brie
f you in person because I’m dead.

  Now, you might be wondering why this journal is so large. I could soft-soap you and claim that I just wanted to leave you with a full and balanced perspective on the events surrounding OPERATION INCORRIGIBLE—it’s certainly a valid half-truth—but the real reason is that I’ve been under a lot of stress lately. Nervous breakdowns are a luxury item that we don’t have time for right now, and anyway, all our security-cleared therapists are booked up eight months in advance: so the only psychotherapy I’m getting is the DIY kind, and pouring it all out into a private diary that’s going to be classified up to its armpits and buried in a TOP SECRET vault guarded by security zombies until I’m too dead to be embarrassed by it seemed like a good compromise. So I wrote it this way, and I don’t have the time (or inclination, frankly) to go back and take all the personal stuff out: duty calls, etcetera, and you’ll just have to suck it up.

  If I were Bob, this journal would probably claim to be written by “Sabine Braveheart” or some such nonsense, but after OPERATION INCORRIGIBLE my patience with silly pseudonyms is at an all-time low. So I’ll use pseudonyms where necessary to protect high-clearance covert assets, and for people who insist on hiding under rocks—yes, Bob, if you’re reading this I’m talking about you—but the rest of the time I’ll call a spade a bloody shovel, not EARTHMOVER CRIMSON VORTEX.

  Anyway, you got this far so let me finish the prelude to the intro by adding that if you can get past all the Bridget Jones meets The Apocalypse stuff you might pick up some useful workplace tips. (To say nothing of the juicy office gossip.)

  * * *

  Now, to the subject matter at hand (feel free to skip the rest of this foreword if you already know it all):*

  Bob and I are operatives working for an obscure department of the British civil service, known to its inmates—of whom you are now one—as the Laundry. We’re based in London. To family and friends, we’re civil servants; Bob works in IT, while I have a part-time consultancy post and also teach theory and philosophy of music at Birkbeck College. In actual fact, Bob is a computational demonologist turned necromancer, and I am a combat epistemologist. (It’s my job to study hostile philosophies, and disrupt them. Don’t ask; it’ll all become clear later.)

  I also play the violin.

  A brief recap: magic is the name given to the practice of manipulating the ultrastructure of reality by carrying out mathematical operations. We live in a multiverse, and certain operators trigger echoes in the Platonic realm of mathematical truth, echoes which can be amplified and fed back into our (and other) realities. Computers, being machines for executing mathematical operations at very high speed, are useful to us as occult engines. Likewise, some of us have the ability to carry out magical operations in our own heads, albeit at terrible cost.

  Magic used to be rare and difficult and unsystematized. It became rather more common and easy and formal after Alan Turing put it on a sound theoretical footing at Bletchley Park during the war: for which sin, our predecessors had him bumped off during the 1950s. It was an act of epic stupidity; these days people who rediscover the core theorems are recruited and put to use by the organization.

  Unfortunately, computers are everywhere these days—and so are hackers, to such an extent that we have a serious human resources problem, as in: too many people to keep track of. Worse: there are not only too many computers, but too many brains. The effect of all this thinking on the structure of spacetime is damaging—the more magic there is, the easier magic becomes, and the risk we run is that the increasing rate of thaum flux over time tends to infinity and we hit the magical singularity and ordinary people acquire godlike powers as spacetime breaks down, and then the ancient nightmares known as the Elder Gods come out to play. We in the Laundry refer to this apocalyptic situation as CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, and it is the most immediate of the CASE NIGHTMARE RAINBOW scenarios—existential threats to the future survival of the human species. The bad news is, due to the population crisis we’ve been in the early stages of CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN for the past few years, and we are unlikely to be safe again before the middle of the 22nd century.

  And so it is that Bob and I live a curious double life—as boring middle-aged civil servants on the one hand, and as the nation’s occult security service on the other.

  Which brings me to the subject of OPERATION INCORRIGIBLE.

  I’m supposed to give you a full and frank account of OPERATION INCORRIGIBLE. The trouble is, my experience of it was colored by certain events of a personal nature, and although I recognize that it’s highly unprofessional to bring one’s private life into the office, not to mention potentially offensive and a violation of HR guidelines on respect for diversity and sexual misconduct, I can’t let it pass.

  Bluntly: Bob started it, and I really can’t see any way to explain what went wrong with OPERATION INCORRIGIBLE without reference to the Vampire Bitch from HR, not to mention Her With The Gills. Or the Mayor, the nude sculpture on the Fourth Plinth, and how I blew my cover. Also: the plague of superheroes, what it’s like to have to set up a government agency from scratch during a crisis, and the truth about what it was like to be a member of the official Home Office superhero team. And finally, the truth about my relationship with Officer Friendly.

  So, Bob—Bob? I know you’re reading this—you’d better tell HR to get on the phone to RELATE and find us a marriage guidance counselor with a security clearance.

  Because this is what happened, really and truly.

  2.

  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 lik
e 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.*