She’s not looking to move in, rent a pod—she just needs someplace to hide while she works out her next move. Problem is, she has no next move. She’s got nobody left to turn to, and not just because Yoram has sold her out. She realises there’s nobody she would turn to: nobody she has any reason to trust or who would do her a solid now that she has nothing to offer in return. She doesn’t have friends, only people who are afraid of her or who have been paying for her services.
She remembers what Alice said at Klaws, comments that hurt so bad because they found their mark. She’s nobody’s friend, nobody’s enemy and not even anybody’s problem: just their least-worst solution. Now there’s nobody who could be her solution, least-worst or any other kind.
She recalls her last exchange with Candace, who was trying to be a friend, or at least a confidante, until Nikki threw it back in her face.
Even a cold-hearted bitch needs to feel somebody likes her now and again.
They don’t like you, Nikki. It just seems that way because they don’t hate you as much as you do.
Well, she’s pretty sure everybody hates her as much as she does now, especially if the word is out regarding Giselle.
DAMAGE CONTROL
Alice needs to call this in, which means a return to the privacy of her room at the Armstrong Hotel. It isn’t a conversation she can be having over sub-vocal, standing where someone might overhear. She travels by static, compiling further details of her report during the journey back to Garneau, now that she has full functionality of her lens.
She notices a pile of comm requests and other messages stacking up. She scans the list briefly, in case there’s anything that can’t wait. One is from someone at the FNG’s tech department concerning her lens outage. Another is from Helen Petitjean, flagged Urgent. From the impression Alice gleaned during their time together, she is willing to bet it’s anything but. However, she owes Helen on a number of counts, so she decides to respond to the request anyway.
“Ms. Petitjean. I just got your message. I’ve been dealing with a situation. Is everything okay?”
Helen does not reply immediately, and when she does, her tone is breathily meek.
“Alice, my dear. Thank you for getting back to me. I apologise if I gave the impression it was something dramatic. I realise in retrospect, with your current jurisdiction taking in law enforcement, that our definitions of what constitutes ‘urgent’ may diverge.”
Alice finds her cadences pleasing, a hint of the old-fashioned peculiarly reassuring in her present environment.
“Don’t mention it. Is there something I can help you with?”
“Well, it’s simply that I woke up to this horrible, horrible news and felt it was imperative that I speak with you. I just feel so awful for that poor woman. It’s like we are all complicit because we didn’t act in time.”
“Gillian Selby,” Alice says, because there is nothing else she can offer. She speaks quietly, conscious that there are other people in the carriage.
“Was that the name of the ahm, the ahm … the victim?”
“She was a fabrication worker.”
Alice isn’t sure whether Helen was skirting around the word prostitute or the word victim, but some impulse doesn’t want Selby defined as either.
“Of course,” Helen replies, seeming to understand the same point. “But I was actually talking about the sergeant.”
“Nikki Freeman?” Alice needs to confirm.
“Of course. I was concerned about all that she has become, and I warned you she was dangerous, but I never would have believed she could be capable of something like this.”
You don’t know the half of it, she thinks, picturing the slaughterhouse she left behind at Habitek.
“I must confess that sympathy for Nikki Freeman is not what I was expecting to hear from anybody right now,” Alice says.
Least of all you, she does not need to add.
“And therein lies a tragedy in itself. Because one cannot begin to imagine the state of torment someone’s life must reach before they are driven to such despair. And it is all the worse because I know she wasn’t always like this. I knew her when she first arrived here. We were acquaintances, if not precisely what you would call friends. We’ve both been here a long time.”
“Do you know why she came?”
“Not specifically. To escape something, that’s all I know. Some people come to CdC because of what they are trying to leave behind and some people come because they see opportunity, but in both cases we’re trying to build a new future. Nobody comes without hope, no matter what has happened to them in the past. But that’s why we must nurture it, and why corruption is such an insidious enemy. This far from the Earth’s molten core, your moral compass is the only one that guides you. But if it gets damaged, you can so easily become lost up here in the darkness. It becomes a process of tiny increments, each little compromise taking you one step further off the path than the last.
“Something hurt that woman. That’s why she’s here. Something damaged her, and this place should have repaired it, but instead she got worse and worse. That’s why what’s happened should be a time for a new beginning. With you in control, we have the chance to clean up the Seguridad, to change the culture of CdC, and finally make it the launchpad where we truly set our sights upon a better vision of mankind.”
Alice glances across at two people sitting opposite on the static car. She has only been here a matter of days, but she already finds it difficult to look at anyone without wondering what brought them to this place, what their story might be.
“Being able to work here isn’t merely a privilege,” Helen goes on, a warm passion rising in her voice. “It should be a vocation, a calling. Once you finish your shift, your thoughts should be about how best you can rest and prepare to make your next contribution. Not about physical gratification. You should be improving yourself in the interim, every way you can. Reading, learning, practising. Professor Gonçalves has given people an unprecedented shortcut in learning new skills, new abilities and knowledge, so they should be spending the time this shortcut saved them by building on that. Strikes me some of us are making sacrifices and giving so much of ourselves so that mankind can reach for the stars, while others are still just reaching for a bottle or reaching into their shorts.
“If we don’t cure ourselves of these indulgent instincts, if we don’t mature as a species, how do we think those brave pioneers are going to survive for generations on the Arca? These are the problems we need to solve before we can even think about launching that thing. Oh, sure there are technical challenges to be met too, but I believe we’ll solve those ones a whole lot faster once people start learning to behave themselves.”
THE DISAPPEARED
Nikki hears raised female voices, sounds of panic and distress. She doesn’t know if it’s a result of decades of conditioning or something more instinctive, but her immediate concerns are instantly suspended as she readies herself to respond.
She sees a woman hurtle out from between two rows of pods, bashing against a bulkhead and then running full-pelt in her direction. Her eyes are wild, a look of primal ferocity in her face.
Another woman emerges at her back, looking distraught and fearful.
“Stop her,” she calls. “Somebody stop her.”
Nikki grips the electro-pulse baton and takes a defensive stance as the crazed woman barrels towards her. She is about to strike when the other calls out again.
“Please. She’s going to hurt herself.”
Nikki deactivates the baton with her thumb and braces for impact. This is going to hurt. She lets the woman crash into her, absorbing some of her momentum so that she can shift her balance and bring her down. They tumble to the floor together, Nikki taking the brunt of the fall, then Nikki expertly rolls her so that she’s on top. The woman is not strong but she’s desperate, fighting for her life.
The second woman catches up with them and crouches down, putting a hand on the crazy one’s s
houlder.
“Amber, it’s okay. Amber, you’re safe. It’s okay. Just let go. We’ve got you. We’ve got you. It’s okay.”
Her voice is soft and steady, though Nikki can hear the anxiety she’s masking.
Nikki feels the fight go out of Amber, if that is her name. According to her lens, she doesn’t have one. Stowaway, she thinks.
The other woman she knows, now that she can see her up-close. Her name is Zola Petriskaya, a Russian nurse who used to work at the infirmary. A few years back she made sexual assault and harassment allegations against an exec at OmniSant, the company that runs ERU. Then, what do you know, damning evidence suddenly emerged in support of a bullshit fraud allegation against her, and guess which one was expedited in the Seguridad’s list of investigation priorities? Zola was discredited, her contract cancelled and a jump seat was rapidly (and expensively) allocated to bounce her back planetside.
They railroaded her but she didn’t leave town. Now Zola’s the closest thing they have to a doctor down here: a regular patron saint of the Catacombs. She’s getting medical supplies from someplace, and she makes enough in unofficial work to get by in Ghost Town but not enough to escape. Nikki suspects she’s getting paid by somebody upstairs to provide certain services, same as somebody gets paid to sort the air and the water if anything goes wrong.
“Nikki Fixx,” she acknowledges. “Thanks for your help. This one’s extremely distressed.”
“So I see.”
“What brings you down here?”
And there’s another reason she came to Ghost Town. These are not merely Seedee’s materially dispossessed, they are its information-poor also. Zola doesn’t know Nikki is on the lam.
Like most people here, Zola’s lens has limited functionality (if it’s functioning at all, repairs and maintenance being an expensive business). Once you abscond, your lens still retains its localised primary data, but is cut off from network services, such as the centralised ID database, in the same way as Nikki was instantly cut off from Seguridad comms channels. Nikki is still able to access these other services because Trick hacked her rig years ago, allowing her to switch between multiple identities, and Hayley Ortega still has her basic privileges intact.
“Can you help me get her back to my nook?” Zola asks.
“Sure.”
They assist Amber onto unsteady feet, the fight and mania having gone out of her. She needs merely to be led rather than carried. They flank her either side, making sure she doesn’t bash herself against anything but also positioning themselves to prevent another flight attempt.
“They took my baby,” Amber says, sounding numb, tearful. “They took her. They took my baby.”
“Who did?” Nikki asks.
“They took my baby. They took my baby.”
“She never says,” Zola replies. “We don’t get much sense out of her. She’s catatonic half the time, incoherent the other half, and occasionally hysterical, like just then.”
“She ever say anything else about the baby?”
“Nothing that makes sense. I think this is something that happened before she came to Seedee. I’m guessing it’s why she came.”
“You say her name is Amber? I’m getting nothing on my lens. She’s reading completely blank. She could be a stowaway.”
“I’ve asked her what her name is but she says she doesn’t remember. She responds to Amber, but it’s like she knows you’re referring to her even though it’s not her real name. I don’t know, I could be wrong. Just a feeling.”
They reach Zola’s pod, or nook as the ghosts call them. Nikki helps Zola lay her down on a roll-up nano-foam mattress she must have salvaged from somewhere, maybe even her own apartment before she had to bail. Amber curls up into a foetal position, weeping meekly from blank eyes.
“Why Amber, then?”
“Amber is what the man who brought her here called her. He gave me some money and asked me to look after her. He didn’t say when he’d be back, but he hasn’t shown up yet and this was four days ago.”
“Who was he?”
“He wouldn’t tell me. Said it was best for me if I didn’t know. I found out, though. A man here called Jabra has a hacked lens. Jabra got a look at him. He told me his name was Leonard Slovitz.”
The name doesn’t mean anything to Nikki, but she can look it up. Of more immediate concern is finding out more about this Jabra guy so that she can stay out of his line of sight.
“I might speak to him later. Can you show me what he looks like?”
“I can take you to him, or maybe go fetch him so I don’t leave Amber alone.”
“No, no, just send me a pic if you got one.”
“Okay.”
An image appears in Nikki’s lens. Jabra looks Middle Eastern, older than Nikki, an unkempt bushy salt-and-pepper beard dominating his face. In other places she would see him coming a hundred yards out, but in the Catacombs a messy beard is the male dress code, grooming facilities being somewhat sub-optimal.
“What is your business down here?” Zola asks.
“Can’t talk about it. I’m kinda waiting for something, so I’m not in any rush. If you got things you need to attend to, I can sit here with Amber until you get back.”
Zola has the look of a stressed mother who just got an offer to look after the kids for an hour.
“You are sure?”
“Just don’t abandon me here for four days like Leonard.”
Nikki takes a seat down on the floor next to Amber, who is still breathing fast but seems more peaceful, or maybe just exhausted. It’s Nikki’s first chance to get a close look at her. She’s young for Seedee; at least for someone outside the more rarefied professions, where whizz-kids and prodigies proliferate. She looks like she could be mid-twenties, maybe even younger. Certainly not old enough to have made a big mistake she’s running away from.
Maybe running away was her big mistake.
Her eyes remain open, a disconnected waking state that seems a distressing mockery of sleep. She reaches out a hand and rests it on Nikki’s thigh. Nikki looks down and there is eye contact, a supplicant pleading look. It takes a moment to work out what she is pleading for. The answer is merely contact.
She places a hand on top of Amber’s, at which point something softens in her face and her eyes begin to close. A few minutes after that, she is asleep.
Nikki shifts her position, trying to get comfortable in the cramped nook. Amber moves too, Nikki concerned that she has woken her, but she is merely rolling over. Granted a view of the back of her head, Nikki notices that she has a scar from where a mesh has been fitted. This doesn’t fit with the stowaway theory. You can’t get the operation unless you’re legit, and yet she is showing up as having no identity.
Another possibility is that Amber has the credentials to deny identification, but that usually prompts a “not authorised” message in the lens of the beholder, just to rub it in. It would also beg the question of how someone with such credentials could end up abandoned to this place.
Nikki looks closer at Amber’s hands. There doesn’t appear to be a sensor on either wrist, suggesting she doesn’t have a lens. Who has a mesh but no lens?
Of course, a simpler explanation for Amber’s ID showing up blank is that something is wrong at Nikki’s end. It could be the first sign that her rig is corrupting, or that Hayley Ortega’s privileges are more limited than she’d like.
Ordinarily this would be her cue to visit Trick, but that is not an option now, and for multiple reasons. She wonders who these people were that abducted him. Was that bullshit from Alice? Covering up that she had actually called in some help while she was being held there, and had her own people take Trick in for questioning?
No, she realises, and not merely because Trick’s first task was to disable Alice’s lens, thus preventing her contacting anybody.
Nikki flashes back to their conversation in Klaws, concerning the woman who took Trick away.
She mentioned something named Proje
ct Sentinel. You heard of it?
The reason they had subsequently bailed in a big hurry was not, as Alice assumed, because they identified her as having major status with the FNG. It was because something connected her to the same “touch of death” Sol Freitas passed on to Nikki with his final breath.
This being the case, she doesn’t like the implications for her chances of seeing Trick alive again.
For now, Amber’s identity aside, Nikki’s lens appears to be functioning normally, so she runs some searches for Leonard Slovitz.
The good news is that there are no clearance-level restrictions on access to his basic data. The bad news is that he won’t be coming back for Amber any time soon. According to his public profile, Slovitz is a neuroscientist who works at the Neurosophy Foundation. He took a leave of absence to return to Earth for personal reasons. He left CdC on April 7, three days ago, shortly after Zola says he came here.
The date chimes with Nikki but she can’t remember why.
A neuroscientist drops off a basket case in the Catacombs and promptly blows town. Nikki thinks about the shooting incident in Central Plaza, wonders whether Yoram was wrong. Maybe the target was Gonçalves after all.
There are multiple contact details listed for him, accessible at Hayley Ortega’s level of clearance. It’s less than she could access if she was still logged in as a cop, but it’s a lead at least.
Nikki copies a message to all the listed contacts, asking Slovitz to get in touch as a matter of urgency. She adds that it is concerning “a code amber.” She isn’t holding her breath for a reply.
The news feeds are firing out updates in a ferment, horrified responses to the Gillian Selby murder. Won’t be long before somebody at Seguridad leaks what happened at Habitek, or they simply quit trying to contain it because they have someone to pin the whole thing on. Nikki can already imagine the reports once they connect her to the scene. “She went on a killing spree when she was cornered by concerned citizens trying to bring her in.” They can pin Omega on her too, say she went space-crazy, any bullshit they want to make up.
Places in the Darkness Page 26
