Places in the Darkness

by Chris Brookmyre

  There is no movement for several seconds, enough for her to worry that she is in another queue. Then she feels the pressure of a vertical ascent against her back and she breathes again, because this indicates the crate has reached its destination.

  There is one final shunt as the crate is moved clear of the conduit shaft, then stillness and silence. She waits a few moments to be sure, then presses upwards against the lid. It is stuck fast, immovable.

  “Oh no. Oh no, no, no.”

  The crate must have been slid into a slot at the bottom of an automated stacking frame. This is precisely what she was afraid of. She had chosen this address, a botanical genetics lab, because the last time she passed through here, the receiving facility didn’t have such a thing.

  If she waits long enough, her crate will rotate to the top of the stack, but that could be hours or even days. She doesn’t know how often these guys even use the mag-line. (Again, she chose this place because she thought there was a good chance nobody would be down here to see her emerge.)

  She doesn’t have that much air left and she’s using it faster in her growing consternation.

  She begins to bang on the lid and call for help. It might see her apprehended and in custody within the next half-hour, but given the alternative is death by asphyxiation, she has little choice. How long did she think she could stay running for anyway?

  Jesus, she thinks, feeling the sense of panic grow as she bangs and calls, bangs and calls, to no response. What if she was right and the staff seldom come down here unless they’re expecting a delivery?

  No, she reasons, trying to calm herself. If they have a rotator, that means they get a lot of stuff coming through here these days.

  The crate judders and begins to slide. It isn’t being rotated: somebody is hauling it out of the frame.

  Nikki presses with her fingers, the lid springing upwards and open the moment it clears the bracket that was holding it in place. She climbs up into a squat and sees an Asian guy backing away towards the wall. He’s got an interlocking grab-pole in his hands, which he has just used to slide out the crate but is now gripping as a weapon.

  Nikki holds up her palms to gesture that she means no harm.

  “Thanks,” she tells him, climbing slowly upright. He still doesn’t look reassured.

  “Somebody’s idea of a joke,” she adds, indicating the crate. “I was on a night out.”

  He retains his confused look for a moment, then breaks into an uncertain smile, nodding that he gets it. She realises he doesn’t speak English and is probably translating through his mesh.

  “Not funny joke,” he responds, her own mesh rendering his words thus. “I not here, package dead on arrival.”

  “Exactly. I owe you. And I owe them payback. Best be on my way.”

  She steps clear of the crate and begins heading for the door.

  “You are celebration?” he asks.

  “Huh?”

  “Got the test launch big. Go all systems.”

  She doesn’t know what he’s talking about, then remembers that she is identifying as Hayley Ortega. She vaguely recalls hearing that there is a laser-propulsion test vehicle getting ready to launch: a two-year trip to assess long-term habitat sustainability and energy consumption.

  Fortunately, he most likely assumes her bafflement is down to the translation.

  “Yeah, that’s right.”

  She gives him a thumbs-up gesture and hopes to hell these people don’t have any specimens on the flight. She does not want to get into any kind of memorable conversation with this guy, particularly one in which she suspiciously doesn’t know what she’s talking about.

  She heads up to ground level and slips out of a side door. She is in the McAuliffe district, where there is very little foot traffic outside shift change. Most of the buildings are comparatively low-rise, and there are some ground-level empty spaces, used for trial assembly of structures so that they can be sure everything fits and works before sending it up the line to a test vehicle at the dry dock.

  Nikki’s lens is fully functional again after the unavoidable blackout effect of her journey on the mag-line. The electromagnetics play havoc with comms, effectively turning the crate into a Faraday cage. Her log is showing multiple connection attempts from Yoram. She calls him back, voice-only so that she isn’t broadcasting any clues to her whereabouts, and so that her face can’t give anything away either. She wants the information in this call to be heading in one direction only, otherwise there’s no point to it.

  Yoram answers instantly.

  “Nikki. Where are you?”

  “I’m on Nightmare Boulevard, heading south.”

  “What’s going on? Everybody’s looking for you. I got Seguridad outside my building. They’re on the way up here and I need to know what I can and can’t tell them. What the hell did you do?”

  “I’m being set up, Yoram. Somebody killed a girl and left her in my apartment.”

  “A girl? Who?”

  “You don’t know her. A pro. Worked out of a few places on Mullane. She’s connected to me, put it that way.”

  “Damn it. Who did this? Julio?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out, but I’m running out of moves.”

  “I’d tell you to come here, but …”

  “I get it. Wouldn’t want to bring this heat down on you anyway.”

  “I appreciate that. There has to be some way I can help you, though. Do you have money? I can get some to you. Where are you right now?”

  Nikki knows any payments she makes will automatically locate her: her ID is reading Hayley Ortega but the money never lies. She has some funds in chargeable tokens, the Seedee equivalent of cash, but it isn’t going to last her long. It matters little. The only currency that can help her right now is information. She has to find out what the hell is going on before somebody slaps the cuffs on her.

  “Thanks for the offer, but they’re likely to tail anybody you could send. In fact, you best get the word out to everybody that they’re probably under surveillance.”

  “I know more people than they could possibly tail, Nikki, believe me.”

  “Sorry, Yoram. I’m sure you do, and I like the odds. It’s just the stake that I can’t afford.”

  She disconnects, relieved she didn’t have to look at his face as they lied to each other.

  He’s selling her out. He asked where she was—twice—and that wasn’t even the biggest giveaway. Yoram offering help without looking for a back-end? Forget it. The Seguridad aren’t on their way up to his apartment: they got there while she was stuck in the mag-line, and they’ve offered him a deal. It’s what she would do if she were the cop in this situation. She wouldn’t be surprised if Boutsikari and Jaganathan are there in person right now. At the very least they’ll be talking to him, and were probably listening in on her call.

  It hurts, but she doesn’t hold a grudge. She of all people understands how Yoram would do anything to protect what he has here, and more importantly to avoid being sent back to Earth and the ashes of everything he lost. He will tell them something that protects himself as well as giving them what they want.

  She can almost hear it: “I told Nikki that something needed to be done about Omega after the shipment got jacked, but I had no idea she would go so far.” They will get to close the Omega case quick-smart, and to shut down the Gillian Selby murder before it becomes a big deal.

  She checks her location. She’s on McAuliffe, close to the junction with Hadfield, but in truth she’s now leaving Nightmare Boulevard and taking a hard right on to Hellslide Avenue.

  She is exhausted. The adrenalin that fuelled her flight from her apartment (and which was further charged by her desperate resort to the oxygen-roulette of the mag-line) has worn off, leaving her feeling weak and shaky. She could use a drink. She could use a sleep. She can’t remember when she last got some rest.

  No, that’s not true. She remembers fine when she last woke up. It’s the going to sleep part th
at’s fuzzy once again. What’s up with that? This happened before, when she woke up in bed with Candace, cuts on her knuckles, no recollection of how she got them.

  After the disastrous deal at Dock Nine, she worked her shift, broke up some fights, looked into a robbery at an electronics manufacturing firm (almost certainly an inside job) then clocked off and hit some bars. She remembers who she spoke to, who she drank with, early part of the evening, leastways, but after that, nothing. She woke up in someone else’s apartment, someone else’s bed: guy named Arlo, a medical researcher with a sideline in developing performance-enhancing stimulants.

  She doesn’t remember if they did it. She doesn’t remember getting to his place, in fact, only waking up there. That’s where she was when she got the call to go to the Axle, where she got handed the poison chalice that is the Omega case.

  It’s starting to worry her. Frightening possibilities are suggesting themselves. She keeps seeing Giselle, dead in her bedroom. Half a second, that’s all she saw of her, but it’s replaying in her mind more vividly than any grab on a lens.

  She recalls a conversation with Alice, back when she thought she was Jessica.

  It’s irrational, but it’s still a scary idea that what you think is a person could actually be a machine.

  No. That’s only a little bit scary. What’s terrifying … is the thought that you could be an android yourself and not even know.

  She was just screwing with the noob, playing on Earthbound fears about Seedee. Nikki doesn’t believe in the bullshit theories that AI tech is secretly further advanced than anybody knows, but she’s got a mesh inside her skull, and she doesn’t know for sure what that really does. Nobody asks to examine the blueprints before they sign up for the surgery, any more than they would ask to decompile the code before installing a piece of software.

  It’s a device for inserting memories, for Christ’s sake. How does she know that everything she remembers wasn’t uploaded half an hour before she woke up?

  The unavoidable horror is that she doesn’t.

  Like the fear she alluded to about being an android, the scariest part is you’d never know. She could have killed Giselle. She could have killed Omega. Everything she remembers, or thinks she remembers, could have been inserted while she slept, her immediate past edited, rewritten.

  No. Shake it loose, she tells herself. She’s tired and fucked up and she can’t afford to let these ideas into her kitchen. She needs to go to what she knows: she needs to think like a cop, if she can still remember how to do that.

  It’s possible Yoram had Omega killed, but it doesn’t feel right. It’s a zero-option play. When your entire business model relies upon keeping the authorities looking the other way, it’s mutually assured destruction to murder a rival and thus bring down the cops on both your heads. That’s why it doesn’t track that Julio would retaliate by killing a prostitute merely in order to frame Nikki. Julio wouldn’t want to attract that kind of heat, particularly when he’s got some major play in the offing. Plus, it’s way too nuanced a plan for Julio’s mentality.

  That’s who she needs to speak to. She needs to find out what Julio really knows, and to do that she needs to look him in the eye when she’s asking her questions. She can’t go to him, though. Even if he isn’t responsible for what happened to Giselle, he’ll still be only too happy to capture Nikki and hand her over to the Seguridad, thus neutralising her as a threat.

  She needs to draw him out, come at him sideways some place where he’s off guard. In short, she needs an edge.

  She wracks her memory for any angle she can use. It keeps coming back to this nebulous, nagging thought that she’s not been able to pin down; the feeling that she missed something when it was right before her eyes. It was something connecting Omega, Freitas and Dade, something other than that they all worked for Julio, and yet intrinsically linked to that fact.

  The obvious thing they have in common is their day-jobs, though maybe that’s only suggesting itself right now because NutriGen is on Hadfield, only a short walk from where she’s standing. She’s been mulling it over since she braced Freitas but nothing seemed to leap out, maybe because her head is so full of other things. Right now, she has no greater priority to deflect her focus.

  She walks back through everything she can remember about her visit there with Alice: who they spoke to, what they saw.

  There was Vera Polietsky, who they both ran into again at Klaws. Couldn’t be that—Nikki spoke to Freitas before she saw Vera again, and this same undefined thought had been nagging her then.

  There was Frank Jacobs, their supervisor. No, couldn’t be him either. They spoke to him in a bar on Mullane, not at the processing plant.

  Then she zeroes it. It was just before their conversation about AI, and the notion that you might never know if you were an android. Alice stopped in front of one of the fish tanks and stared into it like it was a window into Nikki’s soul. At the time, the girl was being generally weird and evasive, trying not to answer any questions about her family background. Now Nikki knows why that was, but she still doesn’t know what she was finding so interesting about the fact that fish were avoiding one corner of a goddamn tank. She hadn’t paid this much heed because she thought “Jessica” was merely some wide-eyed young intern, and who could predict what she might find fascinating? But if Alice Blake was staring, then there was something worth staring at.

  That’s the thing she missed. Something had snagged on her subconscious inside the place where Omega and two more of Julio’s people worked. She needs another look at it, right now.

  HUMAN INTEREST

  An hour later Alice is still standing in Nikki’s tiny hallway, but now she has been joined by Boutsikari, Captain Jaganathan, medical examiner Dr. Samira Hussein and a Seguridad officer named Phil Lito. Lito is looking vertiginously apprehensive from finding himself in a situation as high above his pay grade as Heinlein Station is above the Pacific Ocean. With her lens and comms system still inoperative, Alice needed somebody to call in the situation and he was the first officer she encountered out on Mullane.

  Boutsikari’s first action upon arriving at the scene was to stress to Lito how imperative it was that he keep his mouth shut, while Alice’s first words to Boutsikari were to convey how this would be pointless.

  She could see the impact as she described her encounter with the startled witness. It was a kick to the gut, but he went from dismay to acceptance with practised speed. Like most political animals, Boutsikari’s primary survival skill was adaptability. His agenda turns on a dime, and he is already formulating new strategies, altering priorities. Right now it’s all about information, getting the details clear in his own mind.

  “Nikki brought you back here?” he asks. “Knowing what you were likely to see?”

  “It wasn’t her idea. She was backed into a corner but I think she reckoned she could get me in and out without seeing what was in the bedroom. Nonetheless, I saw what I saw, and she ran.”

  “As innocent people always do,” says Jaganathan.

  “So what do we know about the victim?”

  “Her name is Gillian Selby,” Lito responds redundantly, drawing a glare from Boutsikari. He knows that much from his lens.

  “I’d estimate she was killed sometime in the last six to eight hours,” Dr. Hussein replies. “Death by strangulation, chokehold with bare hands rather than any kind of ligature. Beaten about the face, defensive abrasions on the hands. Looks like she put up a fight, or maybe it started as a fight and she lost.”

  Six to eight hours, Alice calculates. It most likely happened while she was unconscious, and definitely during the window while she and Nikki were separated.

  “The files say she worked automated production maintenance at a multi-purpose fabrication outfit,” Boutsikari observes. “But I doubt that’s what got her killed. Is she connected to Ben Haim or Martinez?” he asks Jaganathan.

  “Not that I’m aware of.”

  Boutsikari’s expression indic
ates a deep scepticism as to whether Jaganathan would be aware of it either way. Alice can imagine Nikki scoffing at how far the captain is from both his jurisdiction and his comfort zone.

  Boutsikari fixes Lito with a piercing stare, impaling him to the spot.

  “You work Mullane. You know her face?”

  Lito swallows, mouth dry. He doesn’t look like he’s used to speaking truth to power, or speaking anything to power for that matter.

  “I think she was a prostitute,” he answers apologetically, his cringing fear of being the shot messenger indicating that he fully understands the ramifications.

  “Fuck me. A dead hooker, found in the home of, and most likely killed by, Seedee’s dirtiest cop, and someone’s probably got a grab of the body. This is going to be leading the news planetside in a matter of hours.”

  Boutsikari lets out a long sigh at the escalating awfulness.

  “I actually can’t think how we could possibly air more of our dirty laundry in one go. I mean, that’s unless anyone can suggest how we might make this worse.”

  Dr. Hussein clears her throat.

  “Would the victim being pregnant do the trick?”

  “Jesus Christ, you’re kidding me,” Boutsikari says, glaring at Dr. Hussein like she said this just to piss him off. “How can you tell that from a cursory examination?”

  “I wouldn’t need her to pee on a stick. She’s four months gone, maybe five. That’s unless she had one bitch of an abdominal abscess.”

  The ensuing moment of silence is punctured by the arrival of another Seguridad officer, rapping his knuckles tentatively on the doorframe to attract his bosses’ attention.

  “Sir, we’ve been showing Selby’s picture to people in the building. A Mrs. Li Pang confirms that she saw her here with Freeman on multiple occasions. Said they were friends, implied they might be more than that.”

  “Yeah, well, Nikki didn’t get her pregnant,” Boutsikari observes. “Could be something to fight over, though.”