“Better, yes.”
“You ain’t touched your mojito. Get it down you,” she says, through a mouthful of food, more of which tumbles down her chin. “Best mojitos in Seedee, this place.”
Alice makes a play of nudging the mojito away from herself, towards the centre of the table. She says nothing but looks Nikki in the eye.
“What? You’re gonna tell me you don’t drink? Yeah, that’s the kinda joie de vivre that should see you fit right in at FNG.”
“Why did you bring me here?” Alice asks.
“You said you were hungry.”
“No, I mean why did you bring me here specifically? Why are you showing me all this? The bar has a quite vast variety of what I assume to be contraband alcohol openly on display, being merely the largest of about a dozen code violations I could list within thirty seconds of walking in the door. Code violations for which the proprietor has no expectation of being cited, for reasons directly related to the fact that he has no expectation of you paying for anything that is on this table.”
“I like to think of it as community spirit,” Nikki replies, washing down another bite of burrito with what, on balance, Alice decides is indeed probably Scotch.
“It looks a lot like bribery and corruption to me. So why would you show this to an official FNG observer?”
“I told you, I believe in full disclosure. I’m trying to help you understand the context against which this investigation is going to be conducted, which is a lot more grey and grimy and a lot less morally binary than you’re used to.”
“How would you know what I am used to?”
“I know how the FNG views things. They’re all hung up on the ideals of this society we’re building, and by that I mean the society that will be on the Arca, surviving in space for generations. Except they forget that we already got a society here, trying to survive in space. It ain’t as slick and pretty as the academics and politicians would like it. But it ain’t as ugly as they believe it is either. Point being, it is what it is, and we all do what we have to so we can all get along. Ain’t no need to go getting our panties in a bunch over smuggled booze or whatever else gets you through the night.”
“And what about the very people who are supposed to uphold the law and enforce the rules taking bribes and kickbacks? Is their corruption necessary for your society to get along?”
Nikki seems amused at Alice’s indignation.
“You’re making it sound a lot grander than it really is,” she says, shaking her head. She wipes some sauce from her plate with her finger, holding it up so that it glistens for a moment before she pops it into her mouth.
“The black economy is the lubricant that keeps the whole engine running smoothly up here. That’s the thing I need you to get your head around.”
It strikes Alice that all of this is bordering on a confession. She isn’t making specific actionable admissions, but it would be enough to put a spoke in her wheels by getting her suspended pending an investigation. However, Alice is not sure how much of what is being said will prove audible against the sound of the music. Which would be another reason Nikki brought her here.
“You’re kidding yourself if you think you can stay squeaky clean on Seedee and still hope to get anything done, so why don’t you drink your mojito. Make that your symbolic acceptance that you’re gonna get your hands dirty. You won’t get in trouble,” she adds mockingly.
Alice pauses then reaches for the glass, but only so that she can push it a few inches further away.
“I know I’m new here, but I’m not ready to accept your jaded model of CdC after two hours on Mullane. I don’t see the point of being a police officer if you have no respect for the law and just some self-serving arbitrary notion of right and wrong.”
Nikki pauses mid sip of her whisky. The amused look is gone, something altogether more serious in her eyes.
“That’s exactly what I’m trying to tell you here: something you won’t have learned at your Ivy League school or at any FNG induction bullshit. When you’re a cop, right and wrong ain’t about hard and fast rules, and sometimes it ain’t even about laws either. Forget the brochure version of CdC because you won’t find any answers in there. If we want to make headway in this investigation, we’re gonna have to deal with people and move in places that represent the harsher realities of life here. That means you gotta be prepared to turn a blind eye to lesser crimes.”
“And who decides which are the lesser crimes, Detective Freeman?”
“In my experience, bootlegging and payola are less of a threat to society than flaying a human being and turning the body into a real-life exploded anatomy diagram.”
“And in my experience, laws aren’t worth anything to a society unless the people enforcing them respect what they mean.”
From Nikki’s sour look and her silence, Alice knows she laid a glove on her with that.
Freeman is only on the ropes for a moment, though. Her crooked smile returns and she directs her gaze towards the contentious mojito.
“Can’t believe you’re gonna to let that go to waste.”
Alice interprets it as a concession of defeat, though if so it is a pitiably small victory.
As Nikki reaches across to grasp the glass, a man dressed in overalls appears at the edge of their table, red-faced and breathless.
“Nikki,” he gasps, causing her to turn.
She looks at him, calm and curious. She gives no indication whether she recognises him, but clearly he knows who she is.
Alice didn’t see where he arrived from. This would be difficult to discern, given the confusing layout, but she’s pretty sure he can’t have come from outside, or she’d have noticed his approach. He looks like he’s been running, which makes her wonder how far this place goes on for. Maybe he has come from the dance floor, but he doesn’t look dressed for it.
He leans over, cupping a hand to Nikki’s ear to make himself heard over the music. Alice doesn’t catch a word of it, but she can tell from his expression that it is as serious as it is urgent.
Nikki looks up at him, suddenly alert.
“Downstairs?” she says. “Right now?”
He nods gravely.
“Shit.”
She gets up from the table, the man already striding ahead to lead her.
Nikki turns to Alice.
“You stay here, understand? Don’t move. Let me handle this.”
Alice watches her hurry out of the restaurant area. She deliberates for precisely as long as it takes to realise that if she doesn’t follow immediately, she will lose Nikki in the labyrinth, then gets to her feet and starts running.
Nikki disappears from view as soon as Alice rounds the first corner, but she remains traceable from the sight of people moving sharply to let her through. Alice has to give her this much: for all her faults, when somebody needed her urgently, she dropped everything and went flat-out to assist.
Alice hurries along in her wake, racing to pass the people Nikki just scattered before they merge back into her path again. Veering right beyond the edge of the dance floor, she turns into a short corridor just in time to see a bouncer step aside, holding open the door he is guarding in order to let Nikki pass through without breaking stride.
Alice is extended no such courtesy. He lets the door swing shut and steps in front of it, blocking her path.
“I’m with her,” she calls out over the ubiquitous thump of the music. “Sergeant Freeman.”
The bouncer looks sceptical, saying nothing, not flinching in his stance.
Alice gestures a command so that her ID—or rather, Jessica’s ID—flashes up in his lens.
“I’m on FNG business. Official observer. Let me through.”
The bouncer steps aside with a reluctant expression, muttering “It’s your funeral,” as he holds open the door.
She heard Nikki say “Downstairs” but it’s still a surprise to see a staircase descending ahead of her. In her perception of CdC, everything is built upwards from
the curving surface of the wheels’ interiors, with nothing beneath except for the utilities infrastructure: vents, ducts and crawlspaces. Clearly, she’s going to have to revise that quickly.
Alice almost trips in her haste, shooting her hands out against the encroaching walls to steady herself. They are rough, grazing her palms on a crude plaster skim indicating that it is an ad-hoc amendment to the structure, rather than part of the original design. Hitting the bottom, she finds herself in a dimly lit passageway, several doors on either side. Neither Nikki nor the man who came to fetch her are anywhere to be seen.
She can still feel the thump of the beat from upstairs disturbing the very air. The music itself is comparatively muted and indistinct, making the space seem all the more isolated and claustrophobic.
She hears a sharp crack, the unmistakable sound of an impact on human flesh from behind the door to her right. It is followed by a gasp of pain, then a muffled moan.
Alice tries the door but the handle turns uselessly. It is maglocked, the interface showing up on her lens as inaccessible. She doesn’t have the clearance level or the local override code.
She hears more noises from the other side of the passage: a strained grunt of effort, a spluttering cry of agony. Her lens indicates that this interface is active but not locked.
She turns the handle cautiously. Music hits her first, different from upstairs, before she opens the door wide enough to reveal something she’s going to have a hard time unseeing.
The room is done out like something from an eighteenth-century French chateau; or at least the set from a cheap sim trying to evoke the period. There are couches and chaises longues, as well as some kind of swing contraption suspended from the low ceiling. There are ten, maybe a dozen people in there: she can’t be sure. It’s difficult to tell given their interlocking positions. There are heads here, bottoms there, a churning blur of writhing nakedness.
Her intrusion is largely ignored, but for one guy looking up and saying: “Hey, you wanna jump in?”
A galaxy of no, she thinks, closing the door again, wishing she could thus undo opening it.
Belatedly it hits her, the name of the place: Sin Garden. As well as a bar, it’s some kind of sex club—literally an underground sex club.
She looks back towards the stairs and then to the other doors on either side of the passage, wincing to think what might be behind them, and how bad it must be if Nikki had to come running. Then she looks closer into the gloom and observes that where she thought there was a dead end, the corridor actually continues after a ninety-degree turn.
The turn reveals itself to be an s-bend, leading to a longer straight, this time without rooms leading off it. The walls are solid, lined with ducts and conduits, thick lines of cable and piping. She realises that though she has not passed through a door per se, she is no longer within the Sin Garden premises, but in a passageway somewhere beneath Mullane.
The music is all but gone, only a hint of the beat detectable. She can still make out a hubbub of voices and wonders why that would be carrying where the music did not.
She starts as she senses movement around her, her reflexes responding as though she is being snuck up on or ambushed. There is nothing to be seen, only a rumbling vibration from the floor indicating that something just went shuttling past beneath her. A few paces further on, she sees a warning sign on the wall, above an access panel inset into the floor. It features a stick-figure image of a body falling away from a ladder.
DANGER OF DEATH:
MAINTENANCE SHAFT DESCENDS TEN METRES.
HATCH WILL NOT OPEN UNLESS HARNESS
CONNECTION IS DETECTED AT TETHER POINT.
There is a steel loop anchored to the floor next to the panel, a run-stop pulley system monitored by a sensor. The sight of it makes her queasy, as does anything that reminds her that for all it looks like a thriving city, CdC is still clinging permanently to the edge of oblivion. Ten metres, the sign says. She wonders what is beneath the bottom of the shaft: how thick and robust is the final barrier between life and airless freezing death. She wonders also what just rumbled beneath her feet, because that didn’t come from ten metres below.
She is sure the hubbub is getting louder. Maybe she is underneath the dance floor, or maybe she is nearing a route back up.
As she approaches another bend, the sound gets louder still. She turns the corner into a longer stretch, still flanked by pipes and cabling, but at the end, about fifty metres away, is an open doorway. Through it she can see that the space widens out into a concourse.
She is disorientated by the layout but she is pretty sure this is a second thoroughfare vertically parallel with Mullane. It is low-ceilinged and not as broad, but there are hordes of people traversing it, almost as many as she saw on the street above.
Jeez, she wonders, not everybody’s down here having sex, are they?
Then she catches a glimpse. Like upstairs, again it’s the sight of people getting out of the way that she is able to track, though this time it’s more sudden, more violent. People scatter, briefly clearing the view from the doorway to Nikki, who is wrestling someone to the ground.
Alice sees a woman rush to intervene, crouching down and attempting to haul Nikki off whoever she is trying to restrain.
“Hey!” Alice calls out, breaking into a sprint.
The woman looks up to see where the cry came from, then turns her head to look down the passage. She climbs to her feet as Alice reaches the last few metres, balling her fists and readying herself in a stance.
Alice steels herself and accelerates, building up momentum for the moment of impact. Then a door swings shut at the end of the passage, and a fraction of a second later the floor disappears from beneath her feet, swinging away from her in two separating halves.
Alice tumbles into blackness, hitting cold metal a few feet below with a flailing thump, before something solid slides into place above her and seals with a hiss.
She rolls on to her back and hammers at the panel that has just closed above her head. It makes a loud and tinny bang, like she’s inside a drum. It’s not heavy but it is metal, so she isn’t going to be able to punch through it or even buckle it out of its frame. She tests the sides, thumping them with the edges of her balled fists. They are less giving, more substantial. What is above is a lid. This is a crate. She’s trying not to panic, but she can’t help thinking about that hiss, the implications for whether this box she’s just become trapped in is airtight.
There is a shudder, the smallest sense of vertical movement, as though the crate has been raised up and is no longer resting on the floor of the tunnel. At the same time, she feels all her hair stand on end, a response to something electrical, magnetic. The box begins to move, accelerating along the axis she is lying. She puts her hands to the sides, anchoring herself so that she isn’t bashed around. She recalls a moment from childhood: a spider climbing into an open matchbox, a boy sliding it closed and shaking it. His gleeful hand sliding it open again, shaking out the broken pieces.
Alice feels a pull towards the bottom as the crate rapidly decelerates. Then it shunts sideways, smoothly but swiftly, like it’s being moved to a new channel, and a moment later it is accelerating again.
She smells something, sweet but sickly. Cloying.
Alice feels woozy. She knows seasickness is worst when you can’t see the horizon, your eyes unable to track the movement your body is feeling. Her eyes can see nothing at all, but she doesn’t think that’s the source of the weakness creeping over her.
She feels her arms become limp, her eyes begin to close.
THE DEPARTED
People are scattering all around her as Nikki tumbles across the floor, trying to maintain her grip on the guy she’s just tackled. She’s grateful it’s all coated in that rubberlike stuff they’re so fond of in the reclaimed sub-surface. Everything is covered in it here beneath Mullane.
Before it became a neighbourhood of any description, the area was primarily used for constructio
n and fabrication works, back when they were building this section of what became the first wheel. Mag-line conveyor channels were laid beneath sub-surface storage vaults, distributing materials to manufacturing facilities as the section gradually grew its way around into a ninety-degree arc. So much had to be done beneath the surface of each extension before the canopy caught up and allowed people to work above without EVA suits.
Later, once Mullane got repurposed as a residential area, the mag-line channels remained functional but these days they are primarily used by through traffic, passing underneath the neighbourhood. However, the vast network of suddenly redundant sub-surface storage vaults offered all kinds of potential in a burgeoning entertainment district.
Nikki and her fugitive are rolling over and over, trying to be the one who finishes on top. According to her lens his name is Anders, but that’s merely the hacked alias he’s currently rocking. His real name is Fernando.
Folks are getting out of the way so they don’t get bowled over but they’re not panicking. Two assholes rolling on the floor trying to throttle each other is not exactly an exotic sight around these parts.
She doesn’t identify herself as Seguridad. It’s not like anybody would rush to her aid out of a sense of civic duty if she did. They’d just look the other way a little harder.
She’s almost managed to pin him when Nikki feels two hands around her shoulders, trying to pull her off. Fernando’s girlfriend Julia just came up on the flank. She must weigh forty kilograms soaking wet, so she’s not the strongest, but her intervention is enough to loosen Nikki’s hold, allowing Fernando to change grip and shift his weight. The world turns upside down again and suddenly he’s on top of her.
Lying flat on the floor, Nikki looks up in time to see Julia staring intently towards the corridor leading back to Sin Garden, where a door has just closed. She signals to her partner and he lets go, rolling off and scrambling to his feet. The two of them book, zigzagging among the oncoming bodies. They’re out of sight before Nikki is even upright, impossible to track in the crowd. Nikki knows there’s got to be eight or nine doorways out of here. They’re gone.
Places in the Darkness Page 13
