“Not at all. Listen, Zola, I’ve been looking into this Leonard Slovitz. Seems the guy went back to Earth right after he came here and dumped Amber. I’m going to chase this down for you, okay?”
“That would be … I would owe you, Nikki.”
There is deep sincerity in her expression, but also an element of fear in her acknowledgement that she would be in Nikki’s debt: concern as to how Nikki might want a favour returned. Nikki must have seen this look a hundred times before without it really hitting home. She doesn’t like what she’s seeing.
She puts a hand on Zola’s arm.
“No, honey,” she tells her. “You don’t owe me shit.”
Nikki picks her way carefully back through the narrow channels between the decades-old plastic pods. She is in sight of the hidden door back out into Garneau station when she sees someone step through it. It is a bearded man of Middle-Eastern appearance. Their eyes lock before she can get her head down. His name displays as “Hannes Jensen,” but she has no doubt that this is Jabra.
Nor has she any doubt that she has just been made. He will have spotted her face in news feeds, recent shots taken only hours ago. He has seen her identified as Hayley Ortega and won’t be buying it any more than she believes that he is Hannes Jensen. They both know they are each looking at someone with a hacked lens, and in his case it will be confirmation that she is precisely who he thinks.
She considers her options and realises that it’s not a disaster. If he reports her as sighted here, then that could work in her favour, because all going well she will be off Wheel One in about forty-five minutes.
But when did it ever all go well?
Nikki steps out of the hidden door and into the light stream of travellers heading up to street level from the static station. She still has the coveralls and cap on, keeping her head down as she makes her way towards where she has arranged to meet.
Candace said she would be at the junction of Garneau and Young, but Nikki doesn’t take the most direct route. Instead she slips down a parallel passageway and circles back so that she can scope out the situation, verifying first that Candace is there and more importantly checking that nobody else is. She feels disloyal doing this, given what Candace is risking for her, but she can’t take any chances.
She doesn’t see Candace, but she doesn’t see any Seguridad either. There is nobody in uniform on the street, and she is pretty confident she could spot any who were in plain clothes, as there’s very few of them worth a damn as police officers.
She isn’t going to stand out there in plain sight, however.
She is holding her position in the alley when she gets a call request: a reply from Leonard Slovitz.
Nikki answers, and is surprised to hear a woman’s voice: the delay enough to indicate that she is speaking from Earth.
“You sent out a message to my brother. It came to me off a relay.”
“Your brother is Leonard Slovitz?”
“That’s right. I’m calling because I can’t get a hold of him. What’s this code amber? Do you work with him?”
“I was under the impression your brother had returned to Earth. Are you saying he hasn’t?”
“Absolutely not. He hasn’t been back in two years, but if he was coming back, this is where he’d be. He doesn’t have a house down here any more. I’m getting concerned. I usually speak to him pretty regular and I haven’t heard from him in days.”
“I may have gotten my lines crossed. We work on different wheels,” Nikki tells her.
Nikki terminates the call shortly after. She feels bad about adding to the woman’s worry, but suspects she’s right to be concerned. The guy hasn’t just bailed from Seedee, he’s gone on the lam since he got to Earth.
She sees Candace approach from the direction of Gutierrez. Nikki steps out of the passage and intercepts her before she reaches the junction. They stop and stare at each other for just a moment, like they’re not sure what to say. Then Candace steps forward and pulls Nikki into an embrace, kissing her on the cheek.
Nikki hasn’t experienced a sensation like this for as long as she can remember, hasn’t felt someone give her affection. Sex yes, but not this: this is warmth. This is caring. She’d forgotten what it feels like.
Candace is looking all dressed up. Nikki’s never seen her look so good, and not merely because she’s such a welcome sight under the circumstances. She’s carrying a travel bag from which she produces a flight suit. The suit is for Nikki, so she looks like the pilot and Candace the passenger. Taking a shuttle between wheels is an expensive option, exercised only by the rich and the Quadriga elite, hence Candace scrubbing up to look the part.
That is only the beginning of their cover, however.
“I told Bjorn you’re a VIP who’s been on a hush-hush visit to Wheel One and doesn’t want to be seen going back, whether via the Axle or even through normal passenger channels. He’s supplied us with today’s live access codes for Dock Seven.”
Nikki doesn’t see any Seguridad, but she still holds her breath as they approach the entrance and the codes are transmitted. The doors open without delay and they proceed briskly but without conspicuous hurry into the shuttle bay.
Nobody looks at her twice. It’s business as usual: people loading and unloading from the shuttle that’s already in place, others getting ready to serve the next one incoming, which will be Nikki’s ticket out.
She sees the manifest administrator inspecting a crate, checking the details with a cargo handler. That’s when she remembers why the date of Slovitz’s departure rang a bell: Lind’s bullshit story. Maybe it wasn’t bullshit after all.
Lind said a capsule left Heinlein with nobody in it. Maybe it was so that nobody could testify that a certain passenger wasn’t on board. In which case Slovitz hasn’t gone on the lam by bailing to Earth: he’s spent a fortune making it look like he has and effectively rendered himself invisible on Seedee. But why?
From here in the bay she can look up through the canopy and see the next shuttle approach. It disappears out of sight, heading beneath them to the outer side of the wheel, where it will invert and ascend to the dock on a platform.
“There’s been a lot of new faces sniffing around Mullane,” Candace says. “They’ve been asking questions about you, offering cash. They were wanting to know who owed you money.”
“So they know about Giselle?”
“Everybody knows she owed you and was planning to book. I mean, wasn’t that the point?”
“What do you mean?”
Candace takes a step away, her face suddenly stony.
All of the dock workers turn as one, abandoning what they were doing and moving in to surround Nikki. Except they’re not dock workers. They’re Seguridad.
“You killed Giselle to send out a message,” Candace says. “Well, we all got it. And this is our reply.”
LOOK THE DEVIL IN THE EYE
Alice has little difficulty finding her way back through the passageways beneath Mullane, reached via the secret underground exit from Klaws. She is headed for Trick’s workshop, retracing the route she took after escaping it. She has always had a gift for navigation: if she visits a place once, she is able to draw upon a vivid mental map and an infallible sense of direction. It’s almost as though she’s got a photographic memory.
As she steps into the narrow corridor outside the fight club, she closes the door behind her and has a look at the wall. When she first came by here, the door was all but invisible, and she would have had no means of opening it were it not for those guys happening to come out when they did. Now when she gazes at it through her lens, she can see the hidden door picked out in an overlay, the name of the premises stated above an input-request icon. If you know the password, you’re good to go.
She knows she could put out an APB and have Trick brought in if he is to be found at all, but the truth is she doesn’t want the Seguridad involved. Trick constitutes an asset she would like to keep to herself. Finding him without anyone els
e’s help is likely to prove difficult, but having a valuable contact who is not ultimately answerable to Ochoba makes it worth the effort.
The Seguridad would not be much help anyway, she reasons. She doesn’t know Trick’s real name and even if she did, she doubts it would show up in anybody’s lens in response to them looking him in the face.
If she’s being honest, she has no idea how she is going to track him down, but figures this is the obvious place to start. She wends her way back down the passageway, scanning the walls for more hidden entrances. She sees none, but the door to Trick’s lair is easily found on account of still being unrepaired since it got busted open. It remains slightly ajar, though there are no insignia or input icons overlaying it through her lens.
Out of curiosity, she switches from her FNG profile back to Wendy Goodfellow, the first one Trick gave her. Instantly the door becomes picked out in gold trace against the wall, a virtual doorknocker appearing in the centre.
Alice nudges the door further open, catching a glimpse of the chaotic scene she left behind, upturned tables and all manner of electronic debris scattered about the floor. Trick hasn’t been back, and neither has the cleaning service.
She takes a tentative step inside and something moves in swiftly from her right. In half a second she’s staring at the muzzle of a resin gun, Trick’s wary gaze looking along the barrel.
He’s got an electro-pulse in his left hand and not one but two flechette pistols hanging on his belt. He is looking a lot better prepared to deal with surprise visitors this time.
Alice holds up her hands.
“I’m alone,” she says.
Trick lowers the resin gun slowly, reluctantly. There are multiple swellings and contusions on his face, purples, reds and pinks glistening against the dark brown of his skin. One eye is almost closed, and despite the initial rapidity of his movement, he seems lopsided. He limps slightly as he shuffles backwards, beckoning her to step further inside. He seems physically tremulous too. Alice knows she’s looking at a man who has recently been tortured.
“What can I do for you?” he asks, his weary tone indicating that he has no intention of being helpful.
“Anything I ask,” she replies. “Unless you want a one-way ticket south. You were working for Nikki Freeman, weren’t you? Nobody dropped me off here before: you collected me from wherever that crate delivered me on the mag-line. She paid you to wipe my grabs.”
“And yet you ain’t here with a squad of Seguridad. So I’m guessing you can’t prove anything.”
“I can prove you hacked the central database. That would be more than enough to get you a jump seat. But I prefer the idea of keeping you here, where you can be useful. Trouble is, I’m not the only one who knows how useful. Who were they?”
Trick reels at the mere mention.
“Uh-uh. Client confidentiality,” he adds, unconvincingly.
“Clients, huh? I was there, remember? If they were clients, why did they abduct you?”
“They wanted my immediate attention. Beating the crap out of me got it for them. It also served to convey the importance with which they regarded their stipulation that I refrain from telling anyone what they needed me to do. I strongly intend to adhere. So if that’s what you came here for, you’re shit out of luck, because they scare me way more than you do.”
“How did you get away?”
“They let me go. They were finished with me.”
“If what they wanted was so secret, why did they let you walk?”
“Same reason you haven’t had me arrested. They might need me again.”
“They’re not the only dangerous company you’ve been keeping, though.”
Trick looks quizzically at her, not following.
“I forget you’ve been busy, not to mention you’ve had a few bangs on the head. You must have seen the feeds, though.”
“You mean Nikki?” he asks. “That she offed some goon who ran with Julio and then murdered that girl Giselle who worked out of Sin Garden? Yeah, it sounds like bullshit to me.”
“I can confirm first-hand that it’s true. I saw both bodies. I was in Nikki’s apartment: she ran because I saw Giselle lying strangled on her bed. The autopsy puts Giselle’s time of death during the period when I was conveniently out of Nikki’s way, strapped to your table.”
Trick leans against said table, wincing slightly as he aggravates one of his many injuries. He has a troubled look, like he can’t argue with what Alice is telling him but can’t quite believe her either.
“Nikki could use her fists when she needed to, but this shit makes no sense.”
“Nobody is a killer until they kill somebody.”
“See, that’s just it though. People don’t get murdered up here. Yeah, there’s rumours Seguridad covered up some things, made sure they weren’t classified as homicides, but we’re not talking about a whole lot of cases: not over all these years, these decades. People come here to escape the bad stuff. Sometimes they’re gonna fight, sometimes they’re gonna get crazy, but we don’t make it easy to kill each other on Seedee. There’s no guns. No real guns, anyway. All we got is stun restraint weapons and home-brew plastic dart shooters that we make in our fabricators. So much of what we do here is about keeping everybody safe. Keeping everybody alive.
“Nikki’s here fifteen years, part of this culture, keeping the peace. Okay, we both know she’s no angel, but keeping the peace nonetheless. Then suddenly she’s butchering some gangster and killing this girl in the space of two days? I ain’t buying it.”
“There’s a way you could help me find out for sure. That’s why I came here.”
Trick looks sceptical, but she knows he’s intrigued. They also both know she has him over a barrel.
“You can amend the CDB. Does that mean you could access someone else’s private grabs? Theoretically,” she adds, to let him know she isn’t asking him to incriminate himself.
“No. It’s impossible.”
“Says the guy who told me only a god could hack the CDB. You were able to wipe my grabs for Nikki, so I’m assuming you could have copied them too.”
“I had first-hand access to your unit. I couldn’t have done it remotely. I can exploit loopholes in the part of the database governing how an individual is identified, but clearance levels are a tougher beast. I can’t give you a fake profile with clearance levels above your own, for instance, and I can’t access profiles above my clearance level. But that isn’t the problem. The reason grabs are perfectly protected is that individual profiles can only be accessed by a single user. Two people can’t log into one account simultaneously. If you tried, you would get like what they used to call a busy line.”
“You’re saying you were able to mess with my grabs because I was disconnected from the system at the time? I wasn’t using the line?”
“Correct.”
“So could you remotely access a low-clearance profile as long as the person isn’t using it?”
“In theory. Except that nobody is ever not using it. People are permanently connected.”
“Dead people aren’t.”
It takes about an hour. Trick enters a state of trance-like concentration, occasionally muttering with frustration or satisfaction, then suddenly Dev Korlakian appears as one of Alice’s available profiles. She copies the grabación to her local cache, then deletes the original, so that she has sole control of the file. Until she knows what it shows, she doesn’t want Trick accessing Korlakian’s profile later and viewing it for himself.
“Got what you wanted?” he asks.
“I’m about to find out.”
She takes a seat against a wall and begins running the grab.
It’s always jarring, the view from inside someone else’s head, especially when you’re looking at it double-lens, cranked to maximum opacity. The outside world disappears and is replaced with another person’s remembered reality, which can feel creepy enough at the best of times. There is a temptation to sub-frame the image and reduce t
he audio, in order to provide the comfort of distance, but Alice doesn’t want to miss any potential clues. Also, if the killer does turn out to be Nikki Freeman, she doesn’t want to flinch from the reality, so having it thrust at her this way would make the truth impossible to ignore.
Alice is glad she took a seat before she set the grab running, as the moment it starts, everything in her vision lurches and swirls. It shows the view as Omega recoils from a blow, tumbling and clattering against a wall before hitting the floor.
Blood runs into one eye, causing it to close. An arm comes up to wipe it, tattoos on the forearm. Omega is reeling but this moment is also a lull in the assault, and he recognises it as such: his only chance to take action before the next wave. Alice sees activity play on his overlay. He is trying to broadcast. He is calling out, breathless, desperate.
“Help me. Anybody. Please. Get to this location as fast as you can.”
Something moves past, a pair of legs, too quick to focus on any detail.
“Please. Please.”
It’s not clear at this point whether he is saying this for broadcast or saying it to his assailant. Nobody is listening, however. The overlay warns that no signals are getting out.
The view shunts suddenly, like he is being dragged. A hand appears, reaching for his forehead, pressing down, holding it in place. Alice hears a metal clunk that she recognises. He is being restrained.
She hears more clunks, but all she sees, all Omega sees, is the ceiling, grey and blank. He can turn his head left and right a little, but can’t look up or down.
Activity on the overlay indicates one of his hands is working the lens: hurried, desperate, making slips and mistakes. He is trying to access the sharing protocols. The recording is stored locally, and he must know it will upload the moment it gets clear of whatever is blocking the signal. He’s trying to tag it so that it can be accessed by his comrades.
In his panic, he’s gone into the wrong menu sector and the only option visible is to allocate legacy status, meaning the grab would be shared with his named executor.
It’s his last act of free will, the only one open to him.
Places in the Darkness Page 28
