The Prime Minister enters, accompanied by the Chancellor of the Exchequer—both in ordinary evening suits rather than white tie and tails, for this is an informal event—and there is handshaking and greeting, as Schiller introduces them to his handmaids. “Pleased to be here tonight,” Mo overhears the PM saying, “and very pleased to meet you at last! Norman sings your praises, I must say—” Mo’s eyes narrow. It’s the ice-blonde, of course, the Special Political Advisor to Norman Grove, soi-disant Minister for Magic: Anneka Overholt. She’s all teeth and smiling eyes in the presence of Jeremy Michaels, MP for Witney and leader of Her Majesty’s Government. Mo senses something predatory and just slightly putrid around her, an unclean aroma of old blood and decay: but perhaps it’s psychosomatic? It’s inconceivable that Schiller would accept personal hygiene issues among his retinue—
“You look lovely tonight, is that a”—Mo notices that the Chancellor is clearly taking a fancy to Schiller’s other handmaid, whose mane of copper-orange hair hangs in carefully curated locks that artfully suggest wildness—“you must show me the ropes! I must say, I’m really looking forward to—”
“CANDID to MADCAP, Schiller, companion number two, auburn, one-sixty centimeters, who is she?”
“That sounds like Bernadette McGuigan. GP Security, Schiller’s new PA, in charge of site security at Nether Stowe House.”
“Roger that. The Chancellor of the Exchequer just offered her his arm and they’re”—Mo blinks rapidly—“update, the PM is with Overholt. Is Schiller running a dating agency or something?” (Both men are married with children, but they’re also products of the English upper classes, pedigrees back before the Norman invasion and relatives in the Lords. They’re children of privilege, still in early middle age and with enough connections that only an idiot would discuss their private affairs in public.)
“You mean like Berlusconi? Uh, your guess is as good as ours?”
As the new arrivals drift towards the ballroom Mo clears her throat quietly and walks towards the staircase, making no attempt to hide. The cops nod her through, then forget she was ever there. Schiller and his coterie of assistants are following along in the wake of the two senior politicians and their arm candy; the road is now definitely clear. As she reaches the bottom of the stairs and glances at the discreet door with the keypad and the sign saying PRIVATE she taps her left earpiece and subvocalizes: “CANDID to CHIPMUNK, time for your toilet trip. CANDID to ZERO, go to alert state amber. Over.”
Then she calmly and confidently walks up to the door, punches in the combination, and lets herself inside.
*
I don’t know what I expected to see beyond the entrance to the warehouse zone, but a cubicle farm surrounded on all sides by airline cargo containers is not it. A cubicle farm from which Schiller’s minions have been shooting at us. Cubicle farms make really good mazes, even though the partitions aren’t bulletproof, and if Partridge’s merry men didn’t have thermal imagers we’d be pulling back and looking to smoke them out with tear gas at this point—but partitions aren’t terribly heatproof. Nor are the flimsy aluminum airline shipping containers. As Partridge’s piratical crew race through the cubicles and confirm nobody is left to twitch a trigger finger at us, I persuade Johnny to follow me around the edge of the farm until we come to a breeze-block wall. I stop. “Other side,” I tell him. “About five meters thataway there’s probably a fish tank full of something well and truly fucked up. A big one—think in terms of a saltwater wood louse the size of a sheep, surrounded by baby critters.”
“Huh. Can you kill it?”
I wince. The thing’s already nibbling on the edges of my ward. I can hear its demented singsong lullaby, broadcasting calm and love and worship at me. “I think I can do better,” I tell him. “I just need to get close.”
I brought along Angleton’s happy fun sticker book of doom. They’re blocking wards, able to lock out just about anything if you can get close enough to apply one. The mother-thing is in semi-permanent communion with the Sleeper. What I’m hoping is that if I can lock it down with a blocking ward I can cut off all its children simultaneously. Friends don’t let friends try to conquer the world using an army that has a single point of failure, right? I’m pretty sure Schiller’s immune, and the hideous crotch-worms he uses for controlling and coordinating his Inner Temple insiders are probably not so vulnerable—the tongue-hosts were pretty clearly a version one demo program before the real pod person app release—but if I can shut down the gun-toting mooks with one shot we can get to work applying that Anton Piller order for the preservation of material evidence. And the fun begins.
Last time I ran into a brood-mother it nearly got me: they’re stronger and much more insidious than their tongue-eater offspring and I was falling under the influence until Persephone nailed the fucker. But I’m a lot stronger these days and I know what I’m dealing with. It’s like having the world’s most annoying earworm on auto-repeat inside my head, a ghastly remix of “Things Can Only Get Better” by way of “I Kissed a Girl,” performed by Rick Astley’s evil twin. So I push back, forcing the rhythmic chatter into one corner of my skull, and as Johnny slows down, mouth drooping open, I step around the corner into the loading bay. As I expected, there’s a bloody great fish tank sitting on a fork lift pallet. It’s plugged into the electricity mains and a water hose next to a sluice, and I briefly consider the Hazard approach to cleaning out fish tanks—a gallon of concentrated bleach—but you never know: I might need the thing alive. The glass walls of the tank are scummy with algae, but not so opaque that I can’t see the gigantic carapace humping up inside. It knows I’m here, and the mindless chittering rises to a crescendo. It loves me, it holds nothing but benevolent compassion towards me, it’s inviting me to join it in the warm bath of God’s goodwill—
I grit my teeth and slap a self-adhesive sticker on the nearest side of the tank, then tear off another and move around to repeat the process on each side. The tank sits on a box containing pumps and filtration kit, and it’s capped by a lid, and each time I slap a ward on it the love gets fainter and the chitinous crackle of mandibles scraping glass gets more audible. Finally I stick the last ward down on the lid, and the inside of my skull falls silent. It’s lovely, like the moment of stunned disbelief immediately after you finally snap and tell the world’s most annoying office-mate to shut the fuck up—the moment of silence when they have no comeback and you finally had the last word. I take a shaky breath and turn as Johnny shuffles through the doorway, whey-faced. “You did it,” he says breathlessly. “Fuck me.”
“No thanks … hang on a moment.” I’ve unconsciously fallen into a crouch under the weight of the mother-thing’s loving regard. Now I straighten up and open my inner eye again. There are bodies out on the warehouse floor, and in the windowless three-story office block at the opposite side of the shed from where we entered—that’s a nasty surprise, it’s not on the floor plan from the airport security office—but they’re comatose. “I can’t feel any hostile actors right now, though that could change in a hurry. Let’s clean them all out, then begin the search.”
“Begin?” Johnny raises an eyebrow and nods at the tank. “I’d have thought this would do for starters. Ain’t there regulations banning the import of invasive species?”