Places in the Darkness

by Chris Brookmyre

  The medic is administering an injection to the girl whose face got opened up: a sedative maybe. He glances across to Liza, whose missing digits are being put on ice by the woman who brought the bucket. The medic looks fraught, aware he can’t be in two places at once.

  “Somebody call it in. We need more surgeons. And we need the Seguridad to deal with that psycho fucker.”

  Liza explodes from her catatonia, lifting her head and shouting.

  “No cops.”

  Her voice is still connected to the PA, reverberating all the louder having no music to compete with. She climbs to her feet, looking around the room, commanding everyone’s rapt and appalled attention.

  “No fucking cops. Nobody in here tonight saw shit, you people understand that? Nobody saw shit. You breathe a fucking word I will hunt you down.”

  She trains her gaze on Javier’s group, all of them looking up anxiously from where the medic is crouched over their profusely bleeding friend. They are standing there in shock, horrified and incredulous, but now they’re feeling threatened too.

  Liza makes a lens gesture with an intact pinkie, cutting the audio.

  “Get more medics down here,” she tells one of her staff, the rage subsiding from her voice. “Fast as you can. But no cops.”

  “You know, you can’t contain this, Liza,” the medic argues. “It’s gonna be all over Seedee in no time. You need to call the cops: so you can agree an official version of what happened. Put a lid on it.”

  “Maybe it hasn’t affected you over at the enfermería, but FNG are pulling their ‘new broom’ bullshit again. Seguridad are all gonna be on their best behaviour: recording all incidents, doing everything super-straight. I’m going to contain this, because I don’t have a choice.”

  The medic looks to the staff for support, but nobody is prepared to back him up. It’s clear that he’s right, however. They don’t want to argue with the boss, but they must know she’s kidding herself.

  It is Alice who suggests a way out of the impasse. It pops into her head and she acts upon it almost before she has time to fully evaluate the consequences, aware that it’s a window of opportunity that will only be open for a couple of seconds. It is a chance to establish some credentials for her cover, but more importantly, it will make explicit Freeman’s connections to all this at a stroke, forcing her cards on to the table.

  “What about Nikki Fixx?” she suggests.

  Everyone looks at her like she just materialised. Trick’s hack is doing its job: she’s nobody to them, but she just put herself in a context that gives her instant currency.

  Liza doesn’t look convinced.

  “Even Nikki Fixx will be playing it safe right now. She’s too smart to take any chances while they’re looking for a bad apple to make an example of.”

  “I disagree,” Alice states. “I can’t see Nikki letting the undersight curb her play. Though I’m betting her price has gone way up because she’ll be claiming added risk.”

  Liza stares at Alice, weighing up the notion.

  “Still cheaper than getting my whole fucking business shut down, I guess.”

  FULL MOON SATURDAY NIGHT

  Nikki is so in need of a drink after talking to Yoram that she walks to the nearest vending point and actually buys a Qola.

  She’s feeling tremulous just thinking about the mess she’s in, thinking how she’s losing her grip, thinking how she got played.

  Jessica Cho. Jesus fucking Christ.

  She’s being personally investigated by the Principal of the SOE.

  The undercover ruse must have been at Blake’s insistence, and Boutsikari happily went along with the charade, immediately sussing which way the wind was blowing. He threw Nikki under the bus in a move that’s just so Boutsikari that it’s almost hard to be pissed at him; he’s the scorpion stinging the frog.

  Nikki’s been walking around with Alice Blake in tow and she couldn’t have made it more conspicuous that she was trying to cover her tracks. She thought she could get away with it because she was dealing with some wide-eyed naif whom nobody would believe.

  She glugs down half the bottle. She’s going to need a lot more.

  She winces as she remembers how she ditched “Jessica” so that she could get on with the investigation by herself. She’s dug herself in so deep, she’s almost broken through the outside of the wheel, and soon enough she’s going to be hurtling back towards Earth.

  But this can’t simply be about a sting operation on one bent cop, she reasons. Not with someone so senior throwing herself into the ring like this. What’s Blake’s agenda? It has to be something bigger than Nikki; bigger than Omega’s murder too. Maybe Nikki’s only play here is to demonstrate that there is method in her badness. Show Blake she’s an asset.

  She finishes the bottle, buys another.

  Some asset, she thinks, popping the cap and taking another slug. The last to know. She needs to get ahead of this, needs to give Blake a reason not to put her on the first shuttle back to Heinlein.

  Her thoughts immediately turn to that slippery fucker Lind at the docks. She checks his profile and runs a status query. Sure enough, he’s got location switched on like a good little corporate climber. He’s kicking it in a bar over on Mullane. Ain’t that convenient. She needs to get herself back over there anyway, to make a pick-up. And a decent drink would be good too.

  She takes another static halfway around the wheel. She shares the car with a weird mix that shows Seedee society in microcosm: people on their way to work, bleary-eyed and waiting for the stims to kick in so they can start their day; others heading out on the town, their shift over, looking to feed the id and feel some humanity as they float out here in space.

  As she reaches to the surface again, she looks up through the narrow gap between the buildings. She glimpses the moon for a moment before the spin takes it out of sight. It’s always night-time on Mullane, and the moon is always full.

  She hears someone mention that it’s Saturday. The day of the week doesn’t matter here; it’s merely a way of marking time.

  She remembers her old life, old self, when she was a cop in LA. They used to talk about a “full moon Saturday night” like it was some kind of explanation for the shit they were dealing with. It was classic confirmation bias. If it was a particularly crazy Saturday night and the moon was full, the cops would point to it as proof of the phenomenon, forgetting the other three crazy Saturday nights each month when the moon wasn’t.

  Walking down Mullane, she reflects that people here don’t get so crazy. There’s no need for crackdowns or moral crusades. You get the occasional fight breaking out, but that’s all. Nobody’s getting shot with a Saturday night special.

  Seguridad’s reluctance to recognise a homicide notwithstanding, very few people on Seedee ever actually want to kill each other. That’s why what happened to Omega is so jarring. She knows this is strange to say, given that Seedee has always been neck-deep in vice, but it feels like the end of an innocence. She can’t shake the feeling that after fifteen years in this place, everything is slipping away from her. Something very bad is taking hold and she no longer has the smarts to identify the threat, let alone do anything to stop it.

  Lind is in a joint called Spiral, on the ground floor of one of Wheel One’s tallest buildings. The name is a reference to gravity. It’s essentially a pick-up joint, trading on owning a suite of zero-g fuck pads in the upper levels of the structure. You can rent them by the hour at the bar, and you can usually rent someone to share them too.

  Nikki slips in quietly, keeping out of sight of Lind as she makes her way to the bar. He’s seated at a booth with a couple of dorky-looking friends. Oh, yeah, if they’re getting any they’re paying for it.

  She talks to Sela, the proprietor. Sela’s an ex-cop like herself, from Copenhagen. Lost a leg in a motorbike crash. Lost the husband who was riding pillion. She worked vice back in Denmark, but decided to work the other side when she sought out her new start in Seedee.

>   “Nikki Fixx. I just paid you last week. Is there a problem?”

  Nikki eyes the gantry. There are two Speyside malts and a bottle of Isle of Harris gin that she just knows came from the missing shipment. She swallows back the question. Sela wouldn’t answer it anyway.

  “I’m here on other business.”

  “You mean, like, actual police work?” Sela asks scornfully.

  “Sometimes it can’t be avoided.”

  “Can I get you something? On the house, of course,” she adds.

  Nikki can detect the hint of grudge in there. Normally it would bounce off her, but it’s bothering her tonight. What’s up with that? It’s like she’s still got Alice looking over her shoulder. The girl ain’t even here but she’s still functioning as Nikki’s auxiliary conscience.

  “Glenfiddich. And I’ll pay for it.”

  Sela gives her a surprised look, but she’s not going to argue the point. She pours the shot and slides it gently in front of Nikki.

  “So what else can I help you with?”

  “I need a favour.”

  “Favours are not cheap here.”

  “I’ll discount you half next month’s sub.”

  Sela gawps.

  “Sounds like a big favour.”

  It isn’t. The payment is disproportionate, but she needs a result and she doesn’t want to waste time negotiating.

  Nikki tells her what she requires. Sela nods.

  “Won’t be a problem.”

  Nikki slips half the dram between her lips like it’s an oyster, letting it play around her mouth, feeling the burn on her tongue. She swallows and instantly feels better, but only for a moment. That’s always how it is, except the moments keep getting shorter.

  “So how’s tricks tonight? Any trouble, any excitement?”

  “You just missed it,” Sela replies wearily, like she’s had quite enough of weird behaviour to last two lifetimes but she’s stuck here making a living from it anyways.

  “This lady gets up from one of the tables, strips off all her clothes and lets them drop on the floor. She comes up to this guy where you’re standing, this total stranger, says to him: ‘Fuck me right here on top of the bar.’ I mean, like, demands he do her.”

  Nikki raises an enquiring eyebrow.

  “She a pro?”

  “No. Real straight-arrow type. Engineer or something. I heard her talking when she first came in. She’s working on recycling systems for a test vehicle. Based at the dry dock, so she must be pretty high clearance.”

  “You intervene?”

  “Not my job to get in the way of anybody having a good time. It isn’t like we have families in here eating dinner. Very weird, though. She really wasn’t the type, and yet she looked like she’d have killed me if I did intervene.”

  “So this guy did her right here on the bar? I hope you wiped this down.”

  “No. What happens is the guy can’t get wood because there’s all these people standing there. So she just starts asking around, asking who can get it up and is ready for the job right here, right now. Takes the first volunteer. And he was no catch. I mean, hung, give him that much, but with that face and that gut, you or I would never have gone far enough to find that out.”

  “You get a grab?”

  “You kidding me? Everybody got a grab.”

  A few minutes later, Sela brings a drink across to where Brock Lind is sitting with his two buddies: one drink, just for him. She glances back towards the bar, where she has instructed one of her girls to be standing in view, and tells him:

  “You must have done somebody a turn. This drink is paid for, and when you’re finished, there’s a special lady who would like to meet you in our private rooms. She’s paid for too. They said it was a bonus.”

  Ten minutes after that, Lind walks into one of the private rooms towards the rear of the premises. The shit-eating grin falls off his face damn fast when he sees who he’s really meeting.

  “Don’t you think I’m special, Brock?” Nikki asks.

  She closes the door and stands in front of it. They both already know he isn’t a physical match for her.

  She orders him to take a seat and he complies without question.

  “Who are you working for?”

  “I already told you. I didn’t get his name. He was a big guy with a Greek symbol tattoo.”

  Nikki sends a picture to his lens. It’s one she got from file, of a guy with a lambda symbol tattooed on his shoulder.

  “This him?”

  “No,” he replies. He winces as he speaks. He’s already getting uncomfortable but he doesn’t know why. Nikki does.

  She sends him a shot of Omega.

  “This is him, yes. He paid me to divert shuttle Hermia.”

  “Who were the other guys?”

  “What other guys?”

  “The ones who locked down Dock Nine. The ones who took our shipment.”

  “Seriously, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Look, I’ve told you what I know, and I really need to go to the bathroom.”

  “That’s because the drink you were comped contained an ultra-powerful diuretic. What you’re feeling now is only the early stages. In a few minutes your bladder is going to feel like the inside of a fire hydrant. Now, I realise you’re out with your friends, got your best suit on, acting the big shot. So you can go back out there, hit the head and then make up whatever lie you like to tell them about what happened in here. Or your big night can end early with you pissing more volume than you ever pissed before, straight into your pants, and you having to slop your way home, soaking wet right down to your shoes. It all depends on how soon you give me what I want.”

  He looks worried now, but she can’t tell if that’s worried because he knows stuff or worried because he doesn’t.

  “Okay, I lied. I didn’t divert Hermia. I only told you it was diverted, that was the deal. Get rid of you, send you to another dock. I didn’t know anything about these other guys.”

  “Bullshit. Of all the docks on this wheel, you sent us to the one that was currently under the control of some private-security types you knew we couldn’t fuck with. Who were they?”

  “I don’t know who they were. Look, I told you Dock Two because it was the furthest away, like I was ordered. When you came back and dangled me down that shaft, I had just got word there was this lockdown on Nine. I was getting that information live on the internal freight admin systems, so I sent you there knowing it would be a dead end. That’s how it went down, I swear. Your shipment came into Dock Eleven like it was supposed to, and the big dude with the tattoo showed up as planned. He and some other guys took it away. That’s why I got extra money in my pocket here tonight. Now, will you please just let me go?”

  Nikki takes out a bottle of water and begins pouring it very slowly into a glass in front of him.

  “You can go anytime, and I can’t stop you. But you’re not leaving this room until you tell me everything. What do you know about the lockdown on Nine?”

  “I don’t know anything about it, other than it happened. Nobody does. It was seriously high-level clearance shit, way above my pay-grade.”

  Nikki leans back in her seat and takes a long gulp from the glass. He’s got to be in agony by now.

  “Okay, you want to know about a lockdown?” he asks eagerly. “I’ll give you something I do know, about another lockdown. Something nobody else has.”

  “Hurry up then. The sooner I’m happy, the sooner you can go drain that little rice-noodle of yours.”

  He squirms in his seat, leaning forward, like a change of posture might give some tiny reduction in the pressure.

  “Okay, a few days ago … this is from someone I used to work with at Heinlein. A few days ago there was a passenger shuttle came in, for transfer to the elevator going home. They cleared everybody out, took total control of the facility. Lockdown. But they still needed operational personnel, and my friend was on duty. He saw the transfer. He hit the button to authorise the descent
.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “I can’t tell you that because he’d be in deep shit. I swore to him I wouldn’t tell anybody. He shouldn’t have told me, but he wanted to know if I knew anything about it from my end. He saw it, though. He saw everything.”

  “Saw what? Who was on board?”

  “Nobody. That’s the whole thing. Not in the shuttle, not in the capsule, nobody. You know how much that costs, right? The whole elevator, the whole shuttle, no passengers. Yet there’s this ultra-high-clearance, bad-ass security detail just like you described on Nine. Few days ago. April seventh. I remember the date because it’s my parents’ wedding anniversary.”

  That’s when she knows it’s bullshit. Worried she wasn’t buying it, he threw in a specific date and the reason he remembered, to try to add authenticity.

  Nikki stares at him for a second and sighs.

  “So, to sum up, you’ve given me something I’m supposed to take your word for, from a source you can’t name, the nub of which is that absolutely nobody went anywhere? Fuck you.”

  She gets up and exits, locking the door behind her. She’s pretty sure he knows nothing, but he pissed her off. Sela can take the clean-up fee out of next month’s payment.

  As she walks away she sees an emergency call flashing up on her lens. Not a Seguridad emergency: a friend-in-need emergency. And a friend in need is a wallet you can bleed. Her pick-up will have to wait.

  EMERGENCY SERVICES

  Nikki detects a weird vibe as soon as she walks into Klaws. The bar is busy and it’s obvious a lot of the people in here were downstairs when the incident happened. Some of them look real freaked and are taking a moment to deal before they move on. Others are regaling late arrivals of what they saw, some laughing about it. Everything is entertainment as long as it’s happening to somebody else. Grabs are no doubt being shared. No way of getting those genies back into the bottle, but there are other steps that can be taken to contain the situation.

  She has a quiet word with some of the more loquaciously inclined witnesses, making sure they know to pass the word around; making sure they understand the consequences of non-compliance too.