A young male Seguridad officer in uniform hurries over to where she is crouching, breathless. She doesn’t know how much he’s seen, but he came to check on her rather than chase after fugitives, so at least she knows he’s got his priorities straight. She thinks of some of the overeager Nazi whackjob rookies she worked with in LA. They’d leave the victim bleeding out while they chased after the perp, thinking only of the take-down.
“You call this in?” he enquires.
He knows to ask, understands that it’s her decision. Attaboy.
“Carlos, right?” she asks, though her lens already tells her this.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Forget it. I know who they are and what it was about. I’ll be catching up to them soon enough.”
“Understood.”
Nikki makes her way back upstairs to Sin Garden, where it’s really filling up.
When she gets back to the dining area, there is no sign of Alice. Given the growing line waiting for a table, she is surprised to find that their plates are still there, the remnants of their food not enough to look unfinished. Maybe it’s the untouched mojito that swung it, sitting in no man’s land between the two plates.
“You see where she went?” Nikki asks their waitress.
“She took off after you.”
“Just like I told her not to.”
Oh well, Nikki thinks. The girl didn’t follow an explicit instruction, so it’s her own lookout where she ended up. Nikki can’t be responsible for her, and she can’t waste time searching either. She’s got pressing inquiries to make: an urgent investigation to pursue.
DAMAGED GOODS
Alice opens her eyes and lets out an involuntary gasp. It takes her mind a while to remember why but her body recalls instantly, reacting with shock. Her memories fall into place quicker than in recent awakenings, but there’s still something sluggish about the time her brain takes to come online.
There is light: that is the first improvement upon her previous situation. And she is stationary, which is the second. This proves less clement when she discovers that it extends to her own ability to move.
“Hey there,” says a friendly male voice, noticing that she is back among the living. “You’re okay. Don’t try to move just yet, though. There’s a scan running to check you haven’t damaged anything. And the restraints are to make sure you don’t hurt yourself until we’re sure whatever you got drugged with has worn off.”
She is lying on a table, her hands, ankles and neck secured by insulated loops, reminding her of her journey to Heinlein Station. Unlike on the elevator, there is no emergency override option visible in her lens. In fact, there is no information appearing there whatsoever.
She turns her head and takes in her surroundings. It doesn’t look like any kind of infirmary or first-aid station. She is in a cluttered, low-ceilinged room strewn with tech in various states of disrepair. If this is any kind of hospital, it’s one for machinery.
There is a man seated at a workbench, looking back at her. She had a momentary fear that it would turn out to be the man she saw in the crowd on Central Plaza, but he was white. This guy has dark skin and grey dreadlocks running half the way down his back, tied in a band presumably to keep them from getting in the way. She can vividly imagine them dragging circuitry and components off the edge of a workbench. His expression is relaxed, which seems at odds with the chaos of the room, and with the fact that he has a prisoner strapped to a table.
Alice can feel her heart thump as she becomes conscious enough to appreciate the gravity of her situation.
“Where am I?” she asks anxiously. “Who are you?”
Once again, there is no information appearing on her lens. She goes to reach for her wrist disc to run a systems check, but not only are both her arms locked in place, a glance reveals that the disc itself is missing.
“The far more interesting question here would appear to be: Who are you?”
He spins around on a revolving stool, enough to reveal that he has her wrist disc clamped in a brace attached to several devices, one of which is a micro-projector making a screen of the wall in front of him.
Alice’s familiar lens overlay readout is scrolling in front of him, displaying information that is supposed to have a biometric lock, visible literally to her eyes only. He has hacked into it to a degree that she has been explicitly assured is impossible.
“What are you doing?” she asks, her voice catching in her throat.
“I’m erasing your memory.”
He speaks with a calm that unnerves her.
She looks around at all the disassembled tech, her mind dredging up the worst crazy rumours she grew up hearing about CdC. Her wrists strain almost involuntarily against the loops as she wonders what kind of a nightmarish cyber chop-shop this might be.
He reads it, lets out a quiet laugh.
“No, don’t panic. I don’t mean your actual memory. Not even Prof G has designs on that shit. I’m talking about your grabs, your lens uploads. There are some people who are concerned that you were backstage without a pass, so to speak, snooping where you weren’t welcome and witness to what you had no right to see.”
“If you mean the orgy, please, I swear, I was only in there a second and I have no intention—”
“They didn’t tell me what specific content the problem was, and I didn’t ask. Best for my own protection and peace of mind. I was asked to wipe everything from today, so that’s what’s happening.”
“But you can only wipe what’s local,” she states, hoping to warn him that his actions here will have an indelible record. “You’re going to get in real trouble for this. My grabs are automatically uploaded to FNG.”
“Yeah, they were,” he says, hovering a finger over her wrist unit. He makes a gesture to execute a command. “And now they’re gone.”
She glances at the wall and sees what he was accessing suddenly vanish.
He seems very calm, but perhaps this is because he doesn’t know who he is really dealing with and how dire the consequences of abducting her. She doesn’t want to break cover, but she’s scared of where this might be going. To keep playing Jessica is looking like a risk she can’t afford to take.
“Whatever it is, I saw what I saw,” she insists. “As you said, you can’t wipe my real memories.”
“Nope. But witness testimony doesn’t have the same traction without grabacións backing it up. Things tend to be a lot less binding when it comes down to ‘he said, she said.’”
“The ‘she said’ may have a little more traction than you’re anticipating when ‘she’ happens to be the incoming Principal of the FNG Security Oversight Executive.”
He pauses a moment, fixing her with a stare. It’s long enough for her to think she has thrown a clog in his gears. Then he points a finger towards the projection of her lens readout.
“Yeah, um, I caught that pretty early. But too late for it to make a difference. See, ‘she’ was concealing that rather salient fact, otherwise I wouldn’t have taken this gig.”
“Let me out of here, right now,” Alice says. She tries to make it sound like a command, but she doesn’t pull it off, her pitch at outraged coming off more as desperate.
“Just as soon as I’m done here. And I wasn’t kidding about the lingering effects of the drug. You stand up now, you’re liable to fall right down again, and I don’t want you any more pissed at me than you already are.”
“There are ways to mitigate that. Who are you?”
“Way I see it, the fact you don’t know that is among the things I got going for me, and I’m not about to give it up.”
“Who are you working for? Who gave you this gig?”
“And I’m afraid that’s another question you can’t compel me to answer.”
“You’d be surprised. I could compel you on to the next free shuttle bound for Heinlein. It would be in your long-term interest to cooperate. Who are you working for? How did I get here?”
“Even if I was minde
d to, I could only answer one of those questions. You were sent here in a mag-line crate, but I don’t know how you ended up inside it. I was given payment and instructions separately.”
“Payment in advance? No proof required that you’re delivering on your end?”
“It’s a matter of trust. Mainly of me trusting them—whoever they might be—to wrap my legs around my neck and use my ass for flechette practice if I fail to deliver.”
“You’re really claiming you don’t know who they are?”
“That’s right. And it didn’t appear they knew who you really are, either. That particular revelation was my own special surprise to unwrap.”
“Have you heard of a man named Dev Korlakian? AKA Omega?”
He looks at her blankly, but she can tell it’s not a no. He’s stonewalling again.
“Remember what I said before, about mitigation? Toss me something here.”
He shrugs.
“Okay. Yes, I have heard of him.”
“Do you know who he was working for?”
“NutriGen,” he replies.
“I thought you were trying not to annoy me. Who else was he working for?”
“I’m not sure I’m minded to answer that, Alice. But I have to say I’m mighty curious that you’ve used the past tense twice when asking about him. Are you saying Omega reached the end of his alphabet?”
Alice realises she’s just screwed up. She doesn’t know who this guy is or who he’s connected to, and she’s just told him Korlakian is dead. From the current context, it’s unlikely he will assume that it was from a sudden illness or an accident at work.
“I’m merely trying to locate Mr. Korlakian and his known associates,” she says, closing the stable door as this horse gallops off towards the horizon. “And it’s ‘Dr. Blake.’”
“Oh, don’t I know it,” he replies, indicating the readout. “And most definitely not Jessica Cho.”
“Wait, can you just edit that stuff?” Alice asks.
FNG identity protocols prevent her from falsifying her ID information. She was able to get her tags amended to pretend she was a junior FNG staffer, but even that had to be carried out under official endorsement. Her problem here is that, as Nikki was so aware, nobody is going to talk to her while they know what she represents.
He holds up his hands, wiggling his fingers eagerly, like a magician onstage or a surgeon about to cut.
“That would be illegal,” he answers, smiling.
She knows that on Earth it’s the wrist unit that broadcasts whatever identifying information you wish to share, meaning that what appears on the viewer’s lens is no more reliable than asking someone their name. Government and corporate premises usually run a localised identity-verification database, tracking everyone who is on-site, but outside there are just too many people. Up here, however, it’s a closed and limited environment: like a single giant building.
“How is it done?” she asks.
“Your lens runs facial-recognition scans on everybody you look at. It then refers to the central database for the corresponding data. That’s when permissions come into play: who’s allowed to know what about whom.”
“I would refer you to my previous remarks about annoying me. I wasn’t asking how the system works. I’m asking how you can be editing it.”
He gives a knowing chuckle.
“My God. You can’t be telling me you’ve hacked the central database.”
The very notion makes her even more woozy than she already was, as this would mean CdC’s entire identity system is fatally compromised. If this joker could hack into it, then presumably the Quadriga could manipulate it too, meaning nothing on it is truly reliable.
He shakes his head, amused by the appalled expression on her face.
“What do you think I am, some kind of a god? Nobody can hack the central database.”
Alice breathes out again.
“What I can do is run a hack that fools the receiver into thinking it has got its information from the CDB, when actually it’s coming straight from your local device.”
“Could you do that for my wrist unit?”
“Sure. And I could trick it out so that you can edit that information yourself. But this would be a special service I only extend to those in a position to offer mitigation,” he adds.
“You got yourself a deal,” Alice tells him.
“Can I have that in writing?”
“I’m assuming you’ve already got my verbal agreement on a grab.”
“How do I know you’ll honour it?”
“This would have to be another matter of trust.”
He gives her a look acknowledging that granting her this is his only play.
A few seconds later he is calling up some arcane-looking code screen on her wrist unit, making changes too fast for her eyes to track.
“Out of interest,” she says, “what else can you unlock on this thing?”
As he turns to answer, his attention is rapidly diverted by the sound of someone smashing his door down.
HOSTILE TERRITORY
Nikki takes a static over to Scobee, which is deep in the heart of Julio’s turf. It’s as she walks past one of the bars he runs that she realises there was an upside to having Jessica hanging around her like a fart in zero-g, which is that the girl was effectively a human shield. Long as Nikki showed up somewhere with a conspicuous FNG dork by her side, it immediately let people know she was here on some kind of official business, and not anything they needed to draw their weapons for.
Julio Martinez and his crew started off running protection in Scobee’s entertainment district, which was a burgeoning competitor to Mullane at the time. They had a limited line on a supply of rum and tequila which they marketed via a strategy patented in Chicago circa 1929, in that Julio’s thugs broke your place up if you didn’t stock his booze.
Julio tried expanding into Mullane a few years back, sending his boys in to start fights. Sometimes they escalated into wreckage, but even when they didn’t, they succeeded in his intention of damaging a place’s reputation. People wanted to unwind and have a good time, and if they couldn’t do that safely without worrying that they might end up collateral damage in a brawl, or busted up by some psycho for looking at him wrong, they would stay away.
That was when Nikki stepped in. Essentially she undercut Julio’s protection rates, and thus nurtured a mutually beneficial partnership with Yoram Ben Haim. Nikki, with a badge and Seguridad backup on her side, ran Julio’s assholes out of town, leaving Yoram with a near monopoly of supplying contraband drink and other illicit commodities.
Mullane thrived due to the security and stability it enjoyed, rapidly outgrowing Scobee, which became synonymous with lone-drinker dive bars and home-stilled gut-rot. The price of this success was that Yoram couldn’t keep up with demand, leaving the door open for other suppliers to make inroads into the market. Guys like Lo-Jack can’t afford to run low, so they buy from whoever is selling, and it’s something of a sacred code among Seedee’s bar owners that they don’t tell suppliers who else they’re buying from. If you want them to take your goods, you have to give them something worth buying and you need to give them it on better terms than your competitors.
These days, one of those competitors is Julio. He retreated to lick his wounds but he never went away. Julio got himself into the import business somehow, with a line on primo tequila. At first people were suspicious, reckoning he was distilling his own stuff and decanting it into old bottles. With the ability to easily fabricate the kit, and a million hidden nooks to set up in, lots of people up here have a crack at brewing their own liquor, but it generally tastes like shit. Even the more accomplished and official attempts at vodkas, gins and tequila taste rough or artificial, which adds to the desirability—and consequent dollar value—attached to genuine imports.
But though Julio’s people are known to recycle the bottles—indeed are protective and fastidious about it—what is inside them has been repeatedly proven to
be exactly what it says on the label: the real McCoy, one might even describe it. Not just Jose Cuervo either: AsomBroso, Milagro Unico, Casa Dragones and of course, Don Julio Real. Julio is supplying them all, and for the life of them neither Nikki, Yoram, nor anybody else has been able to work out how he is bringing it in.
Julio was never going to settle for just one slice of the market though, which is why Yoram was already getting edgy even before that major shipment went missing. Tension has been rising steeply between the two factions, so the business that went down at Dock Nine is likely to have both sides on a war footing.
Nikki checks her arsenal as she comes up the stairs on to Seddon Street. She’s got her standard-issue Seguridad “stopper and sticker” load-out: an electro-pulse blackjack and a resin gun. She’s also packing a flechette pistol, which is definitely not standard issue, but nor is it going to do her any good down here, where trouble is most likely to be at close quarters. Those things can cut you up, but they’re never going to stop anybody. Well, apart from Kobra, but that was out of the ordinary. Dart had to have been tipped with a rapid-action sedative, like in the micro-capsules fired by “goodnight guns,” the suppression rifles the Seguridad keep in case of riot.
Nikki heads for Ludus, a boxing gym that she’s heard Omega liked to frequent. She wants to get the view from Julio’s camp while she doesn’t have Jessica present to hear the wider context. Nikki doesn’t know whether any of Omega’s circle will be here, but she’s confident she’ll be able to threaten or bribe someone who can tell her where to find them.
The place is ringing with thumps and clangs and echoes, a low-ceilinged chamber that looks larger because of the mirrors along two walls. There are two guys sparring in the ring, stop-start stuff, a trainer coaching specific moves. Close by she sees a woman hitting combinations, one-two, one-one-two, sweat flying off taut muscles as she pounds the pads being held up by a dude twice her weight. People are working speedballs and heavy bags, so intent upon what they’re doing that Nikki’s entrance barely merits the briefest glance.
Places in the Darkness Page 14
