Places in the Darkness

by Chris Brookmyre

  Your instinct will be to delete this grab. Do not. I want you to keep it, and I want you to watch it again any time you are even thinking of telling anybody about what we did. Because if she finds you, what happened to your leg will be a treasured memory by comparison.

  If she tracks you down, I recommend taking whatever course is available to end yourself, because she won’t make it so quick. Believe me, it’s what I will be doing.

  “And you really have no memory of inflicting this injury upon yourself?” Alice asks. “Only the grab?”

  “Nothing. It’s like it happened to somebody else, or my memory was on pause while I was under someone else’s control.”

  Alice is on the verge of thinking she could use a drink herself.

  “The implications of this technology are terrifying,” she says. “And I’m inclined to believe that Slovitz thought so too. He wanted to blow the whistle on it by smuggling out the device and bringing its existence to light. Unfortunately for everybody it ended up in the hands of a criminal.”

  “I think the phrase you’re looking for is fucking asshole moron gangster shitbird,” says Nikki. “And I’m starting to see a timeline. I figure Omega goes back and tells his boss they’ve got this amazing weapon that’s gonna change everything for them—just as soon as Yash works out how to operate the damn thing. That’s why they get pumped up all of a sudden, pulling shit like jacking Yoram’s shipment. They could have done something like that before but they never dared risk the reprisals.

  “Yash must have tried to warn Julio that they were playing with fire, given whatever she saw inside Neurosophy and what she was learning about the device—especially once Omega got sliced and diced.”

  “But Julio wouldn’t listen,” Alice suggests.

  “Because he was a fucking asshole moron gangster shitbird. He assumed Omega’s death was down to me and Yoram because he could only see things in terms of his own little world. And in that world, he was in touching distance of having a mind-control device that would let him rule the roost.”

  “We have to assume that after the raid, my doppelganger suspected Slovitz was the insider. Then presumably she tracked him down and he gave her Omega’s name before she killed him. She then repeats the drill with Omega. I wonder why she made sure his body was found when she managed to conceal what happened to Slovitz?”

  “I don’t know how much Omega told her before he passed out, but it wouldn’t have been difficult for her to suss he was mobbed up. That’s a nightmare scenario for her: instead of a small trio of robbers to silence, she’s got a whole crew. Making a macabre show of Omega gave her a phony gang war to pin everything on.”

  “I don’t know how much he gave her either,” Alice confesses. “I haven’t been able to force myself to watch the whole grab. I’ll have another look.”

  “Okay, you do that. Maybe while we wait Mr. DeLonge can fix us all a coffee. Or something stronger,” Nikki hints, to no satisfactory response.

  Alice scans the grab, skipping the blackouts, homing in on vocal audio signatures to save time. Her doppelganger doesn’t say much, just keeps asking for names. Omega fades in and out of consciousness, but the end doesn’t come quick enough, and he does eventually submit. He may have been a thug and a criminal, but Alice marvels at his loyalty: he withstood remarkable torment before he was prepared to give up his own people.

  “He named Slovitz, Julio and Yash,” she reports. “But not Mr. DeLonge. She didn’t ask anything about transport, so maybe she assumed they got in at ground level using access codes.”

  DeLonge slumps a few inches as some of the tension is slackened.

  “This shouldn’t come as a surprise,” Nikki tells him. “Because if Omega named you, you’d be long dead.”

  Understandably, this doesn’t appear to bring him any comfort.

  “It was Yash who had possession of the device itself,” Alice points out. “Which must have made her the primary target. If she was afraid of being tracked down, why risk drawing attention by experimenting with the thing, making random strangers do weird things in public?”

  “For one, she probably had Julio on her back, demanding results. But maybe she reckoned if she could figure out how to operate this thing, she could use it against the assassin. Looks like she didn’t figure it out soon enough, though. And given that the killer never showed up at this here door, I’m now thinking she did commit suicide when she knew your evil twin was about to show up at hers.”

  “Before she could be tortured to reveal any more names connected to the raid,” Alice confirms.

  Nikki swallows, a look of concern descending upon her.

  “None of this is sounding promising for Amber,” she admits.

  “Who’s Amber?” DeLonge asks.

  “The girl you helped smuggle out. Who had no official identity and who was presumably being held against her will. At least we know where they most likely took her. This all goes back to Neurosophy. And not to some rogue tech-developer there either.”

  “No,” Alice agrees. “Those men at the dock were able to chase off the Seguridad with just their clearance, which was also high enough to suppress their identities from appearing on even my lens. Who can confer that kind of status?”

  “The same level of people who have the resources to cover up a murder by paying for an empty shuttle to Heinlein and an empty elevator capsule to Earth.”

  Alice feels something shudder through her. It is vertiginous, the sudden perception of a chasm that threatens to suck her down. This device, whatever it is, wherever it is, can remotely connect to people’s meshes, overriding even their instincts for self-preservation. And if it can override their conscious will, she is sure it could upload memories without their knowledge also.

  People are reassured against this possibility by the existence of the watermark effect, but they have also been told that the requirement for a physical connection to the machine is a safeguard too. If one has been overcome, why not the other? And if memories could be remotely inserted, what if they could be remotely deleted?

  “Not people,” Alice corrects Nikki. “Person.”

  For there is only one individual on CdC capable of creating such a device: the one who only a few days ago she heard joke about building a robot army. In this moment, Alice understands that if she is indeed an android, then there is no restraining protocol to prevent her making the deduction that has revealed the identity of her designer.

  Her creator.

  Her true mother.

  ROGUE

  Silence falls around the room now that Alice has identified what they are truly up against. She has heard it said that the power of a fear is diminished by the naming of it, but this feels like it has had the opposite effect. It’s as though they’ve been trying to evade the jaws of a shark only to realise they’re already swimming inside the belly of a leviathan.

  “Maria Gonçalves is the most respected person on CdC,” Nikki says. “Not to mention one of the most powerful.”

  “She’s practically a saint,” adds DeLonge. “A goddess.”

  “Nobody is above the law.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  Even before Nikki says this, Alice realises how naïve she is being. Back at Klaws she was appalled how easily the law could be manipulated by a single corrupt cop. Seguridad is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Quadriga, of which Neurosophy is among the crown jewels.

  “It’s not like the Seguridad are gonna walk in and slap the cuffs on her,” Nikki adds. “We don’t have any evidence to bring a case against her anyway. That machine was the whole ball-game, and given that your evil twin must have tracked down the late Ms. Sardana, we can be sure it’s safely back at Neurosophy. Without that, we got nothing.”

  “What about me?” Alice asks quietly, as though reluctant to give voice to this truth and all its implications. “Don’t I prove something?”

  “Not on the basis of the available evidence. We don’t know anything for sure—about you or your psycho looky-l
ikey.”

  “But I do have a grab of the murder. I can prove it wasn’t you, and prove this whole turf-war theory is a set-up.”

  “And how do you think that would play out? ‘Honest, officer, the killer in the grab looks exactly like me but I swear she’s this totally other person who officially doesn’t exist.’ They’d lock you up, then Seguridad would hand you over to those Neurosophy goons soon as Gonçalves snapped her fingers. After that they’d quietly go about getting rid of the only other two people who know the truth.”

  Alice knows Nikki is correct. One of the few things they have going for them right now is that she herself is not yet under suspicion. Nobody knows that she has been acting against Neurosophy’s interests, and nor will they, at least until that shuttle reaches Heinlein. Even then it is possible the two men she shot never got a good enough look at her before the tranquillisers kicked in. And herein, she realises, lies an opportunity.

  Nikki keeps referring to the doppelganger as Alice’s evil twin, but it is in fact Alice who has gone rogue. The doppelganger is off the grid, a silent, anonymous assassin, while Alice’s complementary role is visible and official, a pliable instrument of the law directing the Seguridad in the manner Gonçalves would prefer. As far as the good professor knows, that is exactly what she is doing: obedient and under control.

  “I think I’ve got a better idea,” she announces.

  “Than instantly incriminating yourself? Serve it up.”

  “I’m going to seed reports that Mr. DeLonge is under investigation regarding unauthorised use of a limpet-bug vehicle during hours matching the time of the incursion at Neurosophy.”

  DeLonge already doesn’t like this plan.

  “Are you kidding me? She doesn’t know I was part of this, but you want to use me as bait, in the hope that the two of you can stop a killing machine who took down six men in a matter of minutes?”

  “Oh, we’re not going to stop her, Mr. DeLonge, because she’s not going to find you. Though she is going to be kept busy looking.”

  “Why? Where am I gonna be?”

  ELEMENTS

  Nikki’s stomach lurched the first moment the limpet-bug started to move freely, and it’s lurching a shitload more now that she can see the outside of the wheel, spinning only a few metres beneath them. There are barely the words to express how much she is hating this.

  She is close enough to see the joins between sections, and within the sections the tessellated pattern of interlocking plates. All she can think about is how this whole thing is being held together. She knows it has passed the greatest safety standards the human race has ever exacted, but she also knows that the motivator behind every increase in safety standards has always been that the previous attempt didn’t quite cut it. It’s still merely a man-made object, a human structure spinning in space. If it comes apart, everybody dies. In the history of human exploration, it is thus no different to any vessel that ever set to sea, and the fate of many of them was to sink.

  However, it’s not the sight of the wheel’s exterior that is truly disturbing her, or of the massive structures she can see beneath the canopy on Wheel Two in the middle distance. It’s the endless nothing everywhere else.

  Nikki has seldom been on a shuttle the whole time she’s been on CdC. If there was ever a way of avoiding it, then she took that option, no matter the inconvenience. She only contemplated it when she was on the lam for the same reason she’s prepared to tolerate it now: because there is no alternative.

  Since she first arrived here, Nikki has taken great comfort in where she is not—that being the place she left behind—but she doesn’t enjoy being reminded of where she actually is. Some people love looking up through the canopy and glimpsing the Earth, the Sun and the Moon. Nikki prefers to keep her head down. She likes being on Mullane, a place of permanent night where the neon and the looming closeness of the buildings reveal nothing of what lies above.

  It’s bad enough being on an ion shuttle, but the limpet-bug is like flying through space in a four-door compact. Okay, a little bigger than that, but what the hell, it’s as tiny as it is flimsy, so if confronting the very physicality of the outside of the wheel makes her uneasy, then the fragility of this flying tin can amplifies that tenfold.

  It’s only one step up from being out here in an EVA suit, which to Nikki is the single scariest prospect on Seedee. She’d even go as far as to say they are the three most frightening letters in space, given what they stand for: extravehicular activity.

  She has always been terrified that some emergency or some procedural eventuality would require it of her. At Seguridad, she has occasionally sat in seminars as Quadriga and FNG execs war-gamed mass-evac scenarios. If there was some uncontainable disaster on one of the wheels, and everyone had to make it to the other without recourse to the bottlenecks that would form in the spokes and the Axle, the planned response always involved EVA suits and massive human daisy chains. Nikki remains unsure whether she would rather head towards the conflagration than climb inside a flimsy piece of material and hurl herself into the void hoping she could be towed to safety before the oxygen runs out.

  DeLonge, by contrast, lives for this shit. He was jumpy and apprehensive as they made their way to the hangar, as befits someone so besieged by terror that he had to be physically stopped from committing suicide less than an hour before. Now she would say he is quite literally in his element, except that this makes her queasy too. A pilot’s element would ordinarily be described as “air,” but that element has constituent parts you can actually breathe. They say nature abhors a vacuum, but DeLonge clearly digs it. From the moment they helped him into the cockpit, he has undergone a liberating transformation.

  Strictly speaking, he shouldn’t be in control of any machinery, far less a space vehicle, due to the pain medication he is on, though it’s probably less of a consideration than the volume of single malt he consumed before boarding. Nikki is trying to take some consolation from the fact that at least he doesn’t need his legs to fly.

  There doesn’t seem to be too much of a trick to it once they are clear of the structures, flying half a klick parallel to the Axle through three hundred and sixty degrees of emptiness. It’s only as they draw closer to Wheel Two that Nikki remembers it’s a lot easier being fired out from the bottom of the elevator shaft than executing the manoeuvres necessary at the other end.

  DeLonge inverts the limpet-bug and brings them in close to their destination, matching vector and velocity in preparation for locking onto the rectifier that will guide them inside the elevator shaft. It makes Nikki feel sick, even though there is little sense of motion. It’s the visual effect of the speed corrections as he tries to match the spin, the view through the window making it look as though they are shunting forwards and backwards.

  DeLonge looks frustrated. Nikki doesn’t know how long this usually takes, but it feels wrong. Alice senses it too.

  “Maybe if you hadn’t drunk all that whisky,” G2S chides, helpfully.

  “When I drank it I didn’t know I was going to be doing any space flying.”

  “Yeah,” Nikki says. “And if I’d known we were gonna be doing any space flying, I’d have demanded you share the fucking bottle.”

  “That’s what’s on your mind right now?” Alice asks, tense and surprised. “Ever consider you might have a drink problem, Sergeant Freeman?”

  “No, ma’am, what I got right now is a fucking sobriety problem.”

  The limpet-bug keeps accelerating and decelerating clumsily, failing to home in in on the rectifier.

  “Why aren’t we locking on?” Alice demands.

  “It’s not letting me. Looks like they’ve changed the codes. Maybe you shouldn’t have seeded those reports telling them how we got into this place last time,” he adds in a tone of counter-accusation.

  “Are we screwed?” Nikki asks.

  “No. I can still get you in there. This is a limpet-bug, after all.”

  “Meaning what?”

&nbs
p; “We’ve got clearance to open all maintenance traps and hatches on the wheel exteriors. Can’t guarantee where the shafts will take you, but you’ll be able to get underneath the Neurosophy compound at least.”

  “Better than nothing,” Nikki admits. “So you just clamp over one of these hatches, form an airlock and we go down through the belly of the bug?”

  DeLonge arches his eyebrows.

  “Not exactly.”

  FRAGILE BEINGS

  Nikki’s hands are shaking as she and Alice help each other into their EVA suits inside the bug’s cramped interior. She’s trying to conceal the tremors like a mother not wanting her kid to see she is frightened. She doesn’t know why, but now that they are on the same side she feels drawn to protect the girl. It makes no sense: Alice is the one who appears fearless.

  Or maybe it’s simply that if someone else notices, it forces Nikki to acknowledge to herself just how scared she is.

  That selfish voice inside her asks why she is prepared to go through this in a probably doomed attempt to rescue some crazy girl she’s barely met, and who is most likely already dead anyway. But then, that selfish voice has been running the show for too many years, and nothing got better for her listening to it.

  Also, this isn’t about a rescue. If they’re rescuing anybody, they’re rescuing themselves. It’s not like Nikki can happily get on with her life if she doesn’t go through with this.

  She checks the last of the seals, not at all comforted by the feel of the material. Up here it is always depicted as a virtue for things to be lightweight, but it doesn’t feel like a good thing right now. The layer that will be between her and the cold of space, of imminent death, feels like gossamer. Maybe the barrier between life and death always is.

  She tries not to think about the fact that limpet-bug crews do months of training and sims before they attempt any of this stuff, and even then, it is under the supervision of highly experienced colleagues. She and Alice are doing it with zero formal instruction, under the supervision of a one-legged drunk.