“I mean, what do you think is going on, Nikki? Felicia says Omega paid off this pen-pusher to divert our shipment. So these new guys who took our stuff: are they in with Julio? Because the word I’m hearing is that Julio’s up to something and he thinks it’s going to make him cock of the walk.”
“I’m hearing something similar, but no details.”
“Sounds like I’m getting caught in a pincer movement. Who are his new friends? Somebody high up in the Quadriga? I want to know what connections he has, because this thing at the dock happened as a knock-on effect of the all-stop on Wheel Two, and it wasn’t the only thing that went down around that time.”
“Yeah, I heard somebody took a shot at Maria Gonçalves. Who the hell would do that?” she asks idly.
“Oh, that’s what you heard?”
His tone is oddly aggressive, challenging. She doesn’t get why, but she knows she has annoyed him in a way that has exacerbated how pissed at her he was already.
“What?”
“So you haven’t seen the playback?”
“I’ve been kinda busy,” she replies, then hopes the sarcasm in her tone doesn’t tip him off that she’s dealing with something major.
“Take a moment,” he says. “Have a look.”
He sends her a list of time-stamped grabs, the top of which she begins to play in her lens. She never likes doing this, as it always makes her feel vulnerable. It’s not like she’s worried Yoram is going to cold-cock her while she’s distracted, but it’s too instinctive for reason to override it. The only time she would be comfortable standing up and surrendering that much of her field of view to a recording is alone in her apartment, but then if she were there she wouldn’t need to be watching it on her lens.
The grab shows the terrace in front of the Ver Eterna hotel, taken from somewhere up high on the opposite side of Central Plaza. The terrace looks crowded, another of those corporate receptions with waiting staff carrying champagne and canapés, each tray worth more than they earn in a month. At this distance and running as much lens opacity as she dares, she can’t make out anybody’s face clear enough to ID them. She’s pretty sure one tubby bitch close to the front is Hoffman, and because she knows what’s about to happen, she figures the bird-like woman near the wall at the back for Gonçalves.
They’re all standing around, chatting, being rich and important. Suddenly everybody moves, as though the music just started at a dance. Prof G’s entourage go into action, surrounding their boss, getting her down out of sight. Then the all-stop happens. This throws Nikki because she had assumed it happened first, that the all-stop was part of the plan to take a shot at the prof: people floating in zero-g make easier targets, though it was never likely the professor or her people would fail to get her anchored quick-style.
There were some very high-level people on that terrace, one of whom presumably had the authority to call an all-stop in response to what he or she perceived as an attempt on the professor’s life. It was a panicky response though, because if the prof was injured, it wasn’t going to help anybody’s med-evac and first-aid efforts if there was no gravity.
She watches the ensuing familiar ballet: items gracefully floating away while people drift horizontally for a few moments before finding something to clip on to.
She has learned pretty much nothing. She looks at another feed, one showing the same thing from an angle roughly opposite. It shows the view over the heads of the people on the terrace, probably a camera sited on the Ver Eterna surveilling the plaza. It’s as busy as always, people traversing the square in all directions. Nikki sees someone in a mask. She has to play it twice to pick out the figure in the crowd, to know whereabouts in the square she should be looking.
The assailant raises a weapon, fires silently, turns away and blends in again. There’s maybe two people even notice the incident, and they’re not about to give chase. Most of the folks walking Central Plaza are good, respectable and well-paid W2 residents, who have only heard of flechette-toting bad guys in news reports and tales about the older wheel’s underworld.
“Okay,” she says to Yoram. “Here’s my professional analysis. Some asshole lets loose a flechette at Prof G, it hits a bystander instead and there’s an all-stop. It’s not a serious attempt on the prof’s life. Nobody expects a kill shot from a single plastic dart, especially from distance, so it’s gotta be some kind of statement. What am I missing?”
Yoram frowns, like he can’t believe she’s not getting whatever it is.
“What you’re missing is that the shooter did not. The target was not Gonçalves. It was Alice Blake.”
“Who’s that?” she asks, damn sure the answer is not going to make her look good.
“She’s the incoming Principal of the Security Oversight Executive. Whatever the intention, both dart and statement were aimed at her.”
Nikki is reeling.
“How come you know this?” she asks.
“How come you don’t?”
“We hadn’t been told the identity of Hoffman’s successor. Only that they would be taking over soon.”
This sounds pitiful as it tumbles from her lips.
Freitas and Yoram are both right. She used to be the first to know, and now she’s the last. Paying attention to the wrong things, taking her eye off the ball, letting contacts slide. Getting sloppy. Getting old.
“Someone lensed her on the way here. Shared a capsule and a shuttle with her, put two and two together.”
Yoram delicately handles some of his so caringly cultivated fruit.
“The picture was on certain grapevines,” he adds damningly. “But there’s better footage of her taken during the all-stop.”
Nikki starts the first grabación again. The victim is too far away to get a decent look at.
“Not from what I’ve seen so far,” she observes.
“Have patience. Keep watching. She becomes quite conspicuous.”
Nikki lets it run past the point where she previously switched feeds. The ballet begins, the crowd on the terrace reacting to the loss of gravity with practised calm. Then she sees a female figure, the one who was shot, drift helplessly into the air, her back to the camera. It figures that it would be a recent arrival. There’s always a noob left floating after an all-stop.
The figure slowly turns to face the camera. With a jolt Nikki recognises that it’s Jessica.
She experiences a moment of glorious relief at Yoram’s misapprehension, and is about to tell him he’s got his wires crossed because this is nobody. But the feeling evaporates as she realises she’s been played.
How can a kid like that be in charge of the SOE, she asks herself, then realises that her stoolpigeon could be ten years older than she estimated.
Jesus, can this get any worse?
Nikki flashes on “Jessica” tugging her sleeve back down over the bandage she asked about.
Burned it on the stove.
Fuck.
She remembers noting that when she told Jessica about Gonçalves getting shot at, she didn’t ask if the professor was okay. At the time, Nikki simply thought this was indicative of a typical bloodless FNG autocrat. But now she can see that the reason Jessica didn’t ask was because she already knew. She was right there. She was the one who got hit.
And then, in answer to her question, it does get worse.
The grab shows Blake being rescued by none other than Helen fucking Petitjean, one of the most hawkish moral crusaders on Seedee. If she and her fellow zealots had their way, the Seguridad would become a latter-day equivalent to the religious police that cracked the whip in Arabia before the oil ran out and civil war engulfed the region.
“You got one thing right,” Yoram states wearily. “It wasn’t a serious attempt on her life. She is yet to put her feet under her new desk and somebody’s taking a shot at her. Why would anyone do that when she hasn’t even had time to make any enemies? I mean, in Central Plaza, broad daylight, with a non-lethal weapon? It’s pure theatre.”
&nb
sp; Yoram’s been thinking about this, she can tell. He looks like he hasn’t slept in a while.
“You reckon it was staged?”
“I don’t know, but I think its purpose was to create a ready-made excuse to heighten security and close down activities such as ours. ‘Look at these people, they’re out of control. We need to clean up this town.’ That’s what they’ll be saying.”
“Nobody’s made a huge deal of it so far,” Nikki counters.
The authorities have a bigger matter to deal with right now, but she isn’t going to bring that up. She’s still waiting for Yoram to mention it, and it’s getting suspicious that he hasn’t. He knows Alice Blake is the new SOE chief but he doesn’t know about Omega?
“It’s early,” Yoram responds. “Think about these private security types at the dock. They steal our shipment and it ends up in Julio’s hands. This must be the secret weapon he’s been dropping hints about.”
Nikki recalls Sol Freitas and his smug threat, talking about straws in the wind.
Julio got a play he ain’t made yet.
“Don’t you see? A crackdown would be the perfect cover for some secret Quadriga outfit to take over our operations. It would make sense for them to team up with a useful idiot like Julio, initially at least. Then they’ll quietly get rid of him too once he’s fulfilled his function. Julio’s dumb and egotistical enough not to see that.”
Nikki has to concede it wouldn’t be the first time the authorities effectively licensed a gangster to practise as a means of getting a handle on the whole trade. However, down in the mortuary right now there are about forty different pieces that don’t fit the picture Yoram is putting together.
Unless killing Omega was Yoram’s idea of a pre-emptive strike.
There is an intensity about his face as he finally stands up, a stolid determination in his stance as he steps away from his cherished grapes. He gazes out across the rooftops, through the canopy at the Earth, which is a blue globe in the distance.
“You know, it was a bottle of wine,” he says, looking down at his hands as though he is holding the object he’s talking about. “That’s why I’m here. I was walking past a store in Mar Mikhael. I saw this wine in the window, this rare wine. I don’t mean some expensive exclusive vintage, but a regional wine that we drank on honeymoon, and that I had seldom seen after that. I went into the store and bought a bottle. I was on my way to meet Yosephina and the girls for lunch.
“If I hadn’t stopped to buy the wine, I’d have been sitting at that table too. Or maybe I wouldn’t. I can be fussy that way. Maybe I’d have said the sun’s going to be in someone’s eyes at this table by the window, and we’d have sat someplace else. Maybe it would have made no difference.”
He glances briefly at the Earth again, so small and far away. A place out of reach. A place to which he can never return.
“I didn’t think I could go on. I watched my business fall apart because I didn’t have it in me to work any more. I barely had it in me to eat, to sleep, to function. I came close to killing myself; nobody will ever know how close. Instead I came here. Took a job I could do in my sleep, an insult to the man I once was. That’s why I built something else. It’s all that keeps me going. I built something here and nobody is taking it away from me.”
He turns and looks Nikki in the eye.
“I don’t care who they are. If they want a battle, then I will teach them what a man is capable of when he’s been through what I have and come out the other side.”
THE INTEREST OF CONFLICT
Alice stays where she is as the others make their hurried exit, feeling a rush of woozy nausea from the effort of sitting up. Trick wasn’t kidding about keeping her safely in place until he could be sure the drug had worn off. Everything goes swimmy again, dots appearing before her eyes like her vision has become pixelated and the pixels are getting bigger. She lies back down, turning on to her side, hoping it will pass. She feels her eyes close again, the wooziness subsiding but sleepiness taking its place.
Oblivion beckons and something in her embraces it.
When she comes round once more, her hand has gone numb from the weight of her head upon it. She wonders what the hell that gas was, and how long she was out in the second instance, how long she was out in total. She knows what the time was when she started chasing after Nikki Freeman, but with no readout on her lens, she doesn’t have a clock to check.
Her memories come back quickly this time, and in the vanguard of their charge is a rush of fear as she reconnects to how she felt as she lay there pinned and helpless with those thugs deciding what they might do to her. But then the woman had seen through Alice’s hacked identity and realised they were in over their heads.
She glances across to the workbench and is relieved to see her wrist sensor still lying there where it was carelessly discarded. She doesn’t know how the woman deduced her real identity, what she meant by “running off primary” or what Project Sentinel refers to, but the bottom line is that the three of them quickly understood the ramifications of who they were dealing with.
Don’t you understand what she is?
Effectively in charge of Seguridad: that’s what she is. That’s why they bailed.
She wonders if they somehow knew she wasn’t recording. Possibly they understood on-sight what Trick was up to with her wrist disc, knew it meant her grabación capabilities were offline. No matter. Just like Trick did, they understood her word alone carried plenty of weight.
She swings her legs tentatively over the edge and checks that her feet are going to be steady enough to support her standing upright. There’s still a hint of quease, but it’s fading.
She knows it’s exacerbated by the wooziness, but now that she can see it all properly, being surrounded by so much largely disassembled tech is giving her culture shock. The sense of chaos in itself is overwhelming, but what is truly unsettling is that the hardware looks so arcane, so alien. It is one of the things people find intoxicating about the idea of CdC: that it is a place where technology may have advanced faster, or merely along different paths to what was known on Earth. She had never given that aspect of it much thought, but the possibilities are coming at her fast now.
She wonders what Zack, that little boy on the shuttle, would make of it all. She remembers his wonder as he took in the activity in the freight bay on Heinlein. Are any of them androids? he had asked, and was fully ready to accept it if he was told yes.
When it comes to speculation about the technology on CdC, she wonders why this idea above all holds such fascination. There are robots on Earth, more complex automated systems being developed every day. Artificial intelligence programmes have long since passed the Turing test, or at least demonstrated that the Turing test is no longer particularly useful in helping people define the limits and parameters of AI.
But what the little boy was talking about, the source of enduring wonder (and fear) is the idea of an embodied AI: a machine walking around that looks like a person; that is, in fact, indistinguishable from a human being.
The whole point of the Turing test is about whether you could know the difference, and Alice wouldn’t know what questions to ask, what responses might be the giveaway. In fact, she would have to admit that if there were lifelike androids up here, she could have met one and not known. And if there was one place where she could envisage the development of such technology, then it would be an off-planet construction facility where an android workforce would save a lot of money and solve approximately two hundred thousand problems.
She crosses to the workbench and places the disc gently back into position on the underside of her wrist, feeling a familiar tug against her skin as it forms a bond. The sensor lights up to signal that it is online and she taps to re-establish the connection to her lens.
Nothing happens.
She tries again. Same deal.
It will have to wait. The bigger issue is where the hell she is and how she can get back to Nikki. Somebody abducted her in o
rder to erase her grabs, which means she saw something she wasn’t supposed to. People knew she and Nikki had been asking about Dev Korlakian. She doubts these issues are unrelated, and she wants to hear Nikki’s take on that, as well as the abduction she just witnessed, that of Trick.
She pulls the damaged door further open, enough to edge through the gap, cautiously peering each way before she ventures into the passage outside. It is another long narrow channel similar to the one she was sprinting along when the floor swallowed her up. There are pipes and cables running along one wall, opposite the side she emerged from. She estimates she is still in the sub-surface level, the extent of which she truly had no idea about. There appears to be a network of passageways, connecting a host of hidden premises. It is possible that every bar and club she saw on Mullane has a secret annexe down here, and who knows how many other clandestine hidey-holes, such as Trick’s workshop.
She walks slowly along the corridor, her steps shaky from the wooziness and not a little fear. There is a clatter from somewhere behind her, causing her to shudder. She looks back and sees only the empty passage. Maybe it came from around the corner. As she progresses, she begins to hear the sound of a crowd once again, as well as the bassy thrumming of muffled music. It appears to be coming from behind the wall to her left rather than from further down the corridor.
The hubbub gets louder, rising in excitement, building up to a crescendo of cheers before gradually tailing off amid laughter and applause.
She looks at the blank wall. There is no way in.
There are no doors, just a uniform skim of plaster. Alice raps her knuckles to test what’s beneath it. Feels like steel, like the inside of the door she just came out through.
She retraces her steps and takes a closer look at Trick’s door. There is no handle on the outside, no lock interface. She taps her sensor, restarting her lens again, hoping to check for an authorisation status on the lock. The overlay still remains blank.
Places in the Darkness Page 16
