The Annihilation Score by Charles Stross Read Free Book Online Page A

and for the most part we do an okay job. But as with all organizations, shit trickles down from the top, and if the assholes at the top hold antediluvian attitudes formed in previous decades, you’re going to have to keep practicing your shit-eating grin until they retire.
    In this particular case I am forced to admit that Lockhart has a valid point. Women over a certain age become socially invisible: people just
ignore
us. I’m close enough to the tipping point that if I don’t take care of my appearance, I can fall foul of it. It’s a very strange experience, being the invisible middle-aged woman. You can walk into a shop or restaurant or a bar and eyeballs just seem to slide past you as if you aren’t there. When you’re trying to get served, it’s infuriating, sometimes to the point of being humiliating as well, but in our line of work . . .
    . . . Sometimes having a passive cloak of invisibility that doesn’t set off every thaum detector within a kilometer comes in handy.
    Okay, Mo, you can do this. One step at a time. Treat it as an exercise in street theater, you can do that, can’t you?
I grumble to myself as I refill the cat’s bowl, retrieve my instrument, run a brush through my hair (which is lank from the seaside air and subsequent helicopterride: slept in sufficiently that it’s probably on the edge of becoming a des res for upwardly mobile dormice), and hunt out casualwear I’d ordinarily have relegated to housework-only use. I pick out: jeans, a chunky cable-knit sweater, what used to be a nice flying jacket of Bob’s, a comfy but worn pair of DMs, and by way of accessories a Liberty scarf and a black beret that have both seen better days.
Yeah, that’s my boho mature student persona, baby.
For a moment I contemplate going hipster instead, but that might stand out. A smear of lipstick and a battered leather handbag and I’m ready to serenade the one-legged pigeons of London.
    I collect my instrument, head for the end of the street, and flag down a cab, trying not to spook at odd-looking low-slung black cars or random passers-by. Taxis are expensive, but I’m going to take a “how soon can you” call by the DO as carte blanche to run up a tab. “I need to get to Charing Cross,” I tell the driver. She nods, drops the apocryphal fifth wheel that allows the black cab to pivot in place, then floors the accelerator.
    London traffic is its normal self, which is to say composed entirely of nose-to-tail black cabs, red buses, and confused delivery drivers. Bike couriers weave in and out of the intermittently stationary vehicles without once demonstrating their possession of a survival instinct; I cringe at a couple of near misses and hunker down in the back, wishing the windows were tinted. I feel
way
too exposed out here: exposed and trapped simultaneously. A killer on a stolen motorbike could come up behind us while we’re stopped at traffic lights and put two bullets in the back of my head and I wouldn’t even see them approaching . . .
try not to think about it
. There are commuters on bicycles, and numerous tourists pedaling along gamely on bright blue Boris Bikes. Maybe I should have rented one instead of paying the cabbie? Tried to blend in with the anonymous hordes? It might even have been faster.
    She drops me precisely outside the nearest entrance to Charing Cross tube station. I thank her and head towards the confused mass of pedestrian crossings on the Strand. It takes me a minute or two to make it to the edge of the Square, where I pause beneath thesupercilious gaze of the one-eyed admiral, mentally tug my middle-aged invisibility cloak tight around my shoulders, and take stock of my surroundings.
    In the middle of the square: the fountains, fronted by Nelson’s Column. At each corner: the four plinths, three of them surmounted by pompous Victorian triumphalist statues—General Sir Henry