Places in the Darkness

by Chris Brookmyre

  “If you voluntarily identify yourself as having attended an illegal underground fight club, I can personally guarantee that the FNG and the Quadriga will be informed, the official procedures will be set in train and your contract will be cancelled with no right of appeal. If you have the money, it will be automatically debited to pay for putting you on the first shuttle back to Heinlein. Otherwise you will have to fund some kind of hand-to-mouth existence until the end of your contract period, which means unofficial jobs, none of which you are going to want on your résumé when you get back to Earth. Do you all understand?”

  There are wordless nods, tremulous lips.

  “You share no grabs. You tell nobody about this. You don’t even talk about it to each other. You wake up dreaming about this shit, I want you to slap yourselves in the face. Do you understand?” she asks, louder.

  More nodding, which is not enough.

  “I said do you understand?”

  She elicits a few yes ma’ams, making eye contact with each of them in turn. No question but that they got the message.

  “Okay, get out of here.”

  FAKE EMPIRES

  Nikki can tell they’re relieved to be dismissed. They won’t be talking to anybody. In fact, they’ll be pleased that she gave them permission to collectively erase tonight from their memories.

  They file out, hurrying after the gurneys bearing their two injured friends. In a few moments there’s nobody here but staff, who begin mopping up the blood.

  “So that’s how it’s done here, right?” Alice asks. “You wave your wand and make it all go away?”

  With the place rapidly emptying, little G2S seems less worried about keeping the disgust from her voice. The girl is just teeming with self-righteousness. Nikki doesn’t like to contemplate how pissed she’d be if she had any idea what really happened to her tonight.

  “It’s like a competition to see who can be least ethical. How can a surgeon be playing a willing part in this carnage, tacitly condoning it, enabling it?”

  “Would you rather there wasn’t a surgeon here during a fight night? Because believe me, honey, this shit would still happen.”

  “Look at yourself. A club owner bribes you and suddenly there is no crime? This is your idea of policing?”

  “I haven’t been a policewoman in fifteen years. This is my idea of keeping the peace. In practice the law is a little fuzzier up here than you maybe wrote about in some Ivy League college paper.”

  “From what I’ve seen, the law is whatever you decide suits you at any given time. I’ve never encountered anyone even a fraction as twisted and corrupt.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment, because I’d really have to hustle to make as much dirty money as the scam-artists at the FNG. From the ground-level flat-heads on the take at your department of Franchise, License and Trade right up to the likes of Hoffman. You want to take down corruption? You better stick to the likes of me and the Seguridad, because you’d be farting into thunder going up against the real graft in this place.”

  “You know, I studied law and criminology on three continents before coming up here to space, and I’ve yet to see a murderer or a thief beat the rap on the grounds that there’s a guy down the street who does worse things than her. You think you’re telling it like it is but to me it just sounds like pitiful excuses.”

  Alice folds her arms across her bloodied chest.

  “I’m sure you’re right,” she goes on, “and there is corruption at the highest levels on CdC. So what chance would I have in changing anything when the law enforcement officers are the prime facilitators? You say you’re keeping the peace, like it’s the only way to deal with the world you’ve found yourself in. I would say it’s more like you’re a parasite that has evolved to thrive amid this filth.”

  There is genuine anger in her voice, not merely the usual FNG posturing. She feels bad the girl is getting a crash-course in CdC reality but Alice is talking like the whole thing is Nikki’s fault, and it sticks in her craw to listen to moral commentary from the cheap seats.

  “You’re just shooting the messenger, honey. If it’s me you’re pissed at, then you’re swatting mosquitoes because you can’t drain the swamp.”

  Nikki has looked Alice up, now that she knows who she’s dealing with. She was raised in a rich and influential family, both parents high-ranking diplomats, real FNG aristocracy. From their photographs, it’s apparent that Alice was adopted, or maybe some surrogacy deal. They’re both white; like, really white. They’re old too, and by Nikki’s arithmetic would have both been around fifty when Alice was born. That ought to have made it difficult to get approval for adoption, but maybe you get to cut in line when you’re that connected.

  “You created the swamp,” Alice retorts. “You and the likes of Yoram, of Julio Martinez, of Liza, all the bootleggers, all the pimps, everyone complicit in this squalid trade in flesh and blood.”

  One of the staff notices Alice’s voice rising, casting a glance from where he is cleaning up outside the fight chamber.

  “You think we created this?” Nikki replies, speaking softly, emphasising her calm in the face of Alice’s indignation. She might be a PhD, but the girl needs schooling. “The Quadriga created this. Do you really think the consortium couldn’t produce enough decent alcohol up here to supply every bar on Seedee at a fraction of what the bootleggers charge? Or import the high-end luxury stuff at a reasonable price? But they choose not to. Why do you think that is, Dr. Criminologist?”

  “The Quadriga’s priorities are about designing and building an interstellar spacecraft that will take us to new worlds. And in the shorter term about fashioning a city, a society that will ultimately build and crew that vessel. That’s why they’re not wasting their precious facilities, resources and freight logistics on getting people drunk.”

  Nikki stares at her, analysing her answer thoughtfully. She’ll get along just great with Helen Petitjean, she reckons. Two bitches from a privileged background, pontificating about the future of humanity and making grand plans for how everybody else should live.

  “The Quadriga flies and manufactures plenty of non-essential stuff up here,” she replies. “Their position on booze is a moral decision, not an economic one, pandering to the likes of your acquaintance Helen Petitjean. See, if good liquor wasn’t a rarity, affordable only by the very rich, it wouldn’t be profitable for Yoram to find ways to mess with the cargo chain and smuggle it in here.”

  “You’re saying moral zealots are to blame for immorality?” Alice asks, exasperated by the audacity of this.

  “No. I’m saying certain elements inside the Quadriga have always been happy for Helen’s type to prevail.”

  “You’re making less sense by the second. Why would they be happy about that?”

  “In a word, control. Don’t you think the Quadriga could afford to ensure the blue-collar positions on Seedee pay enough that nobody needs to moonlight as a hooker, or fight bare-knuckle in a basement? Poverty and fear are the two most effective ways of controlling people: large populations or small individuals. The poor have few choices and the better-off are too scared to exercise theirs: they look at the hookers and the people working three jobs and they think “I don’t want to end up in that position. Better not rock the boat.”

  “The Quadriga is happy to let this whole underground economy keep ticking over so that the little people got something to distract themselves with: games to play, battles to fight, tiny empires to build. Nothing that affects the bigger games, bigger battles and bigger empires above, of course. It’s a strategy that has kept order in civilisations for centuries. And those bigger games aren’t about securing patents and contracts. This is empire-building. The players within the Quadriga are positioning themselves to carve up the territory on planets we haven’t discovered yet. We don’t know where our brave new world will be, but we do know that when we get there, we’ll be drinking Coke.”

  “You actually sound sanguine about it,” Alice states. �
�I mean, don’t you care? Isn’t some part of you ashamed that we all came here to drive our civilisation towards something noble, while instead you’re playing your part in dragging it into a cesspit? This place is supposed to be the mother that is going to give birth to humanity’s child. Yet from where I’m standing, it looks like the mother is a drunken whore.”

  Alice’s voice is starting to waver with emotion as she says this. Testify, sister. Nikki’s calculated response to Alice opening her heart is a shrug.

  “Nah. Seedee’s not the mother, it’s just the vagina. You forget: humanity is born from somewhere messy and bloody and stinky. And there’s usually a lot of drinking and fucking involved in conceiving the child. Maybe not in your case, I’m guessing. Which is why you don’t feel part of this society.”

  The rage that the girl has been struggling to contain finally boils over.

  “You aren’t part of this society,” Alice retorts. “You’re just a parasite and a predator that’s evolved to survive in it.”

  Nikki gives her a cold smile, but she’s masking the fact that this hurt, and it hurt because she’s starting to suspect it’s true.

  “I’m Nikki Fixx,” she replies. “I’m everybody’s friend here.”

  “You’re for hire. You’re nobody’s friend.”

  “Well at least I ain’t their enemy.”

  “No, you’re not their enemy. You’re not even their problem. You’re everybody’s least-worst solution.”

  EMERGING TRUST ISSUES

  Alice can barely look at Nikki any more, but nor can she let her out of her sight again. She desperately needs some air, so this is when the reality of CdC truly hits home. The best she could hope for right now is to go out onto Mullane and try to fool herself that she’s outdoors.

  She feels disgusted and she feels disgusting. The sensation of the blood-soaked material against her chest is making her skin crawl. She walks away, heading for the bar. If she can’t have air, another element will have to suffice.

  “Can I get something to drink?” she asks the woman behind the gantry. From across the room Alice thought she looked mid-twenties, and was asking herself how she got here so young. Up close she can see she’s older than Alice, maybe thirty-five. Her true age is in her eyes. Alice wonders what else they’ve seen, and how she can stand to be working down in this vault, serving people who come here to watch bloodshed as entertainment.

  “Sure thing. What’s your poison?”

  Her accent is Nigerian, though her appearance is Somali. Someone else who knows what it is to feel like nowhere is home.

  “I just want a glass of cold water.”

  “I can’t get you something stronger? You look like you’ve been through some heavy shit tonight.”

  “Nah, she won’t touch any fun stuff. Bought her one of Lo-Jack’s famous mojitos at Sin Garden and she wouldn’t even take a sip.”

  Nikki appears by her side, leaning against the bar. Alice doesn’t want to acknowledge her, but she makes brief eye-contact via a mirror behind the gantry.

  “Can I set you up, Nikki?” the barmaid asks, scooping ice into a glass for Alice’s water.

  “Whisky please, Kinsi. Speyside if you got it. Had a couple Qolas earlier because I couldn’t source anything else. Need to remind myself what a real drink tastes like.”

  Kinsi places the iced water in front of Alice.

  “You sure I can’t offer you anything more?” she asks.

  “Not unless you have a spare shirt or a shower back there.”

  Kinsi reaches for a bottle of Glenfiddich and glances at her other customer.

  “Nikki lives just around the corner,” she suggests in a helpful tone. “I’m sure she’s got something clean you could borrow. You could grab a shower there too, couldn’t she, Nikki?”

  Alice can’t imagine anyone feeling less enthusiastic than she does in response to this notion. That is until she looks in the mirror and sees how Nikki is taking it.

  “I don’t think Alice would be all that comfortable stripping naked and taking a shower in my apartment right now,” she says, trying to shut it down.

  She’s damn right on that score, but suddenly Alice’s discomfort is less acute than her curiosity about why Nikki doesn’t want her there. Even the way she said it was an oversell. She didn’t need to talk about stripping naked: that was clearly intended to make her imagine her vulnerability and awkwardness.

  Nikki really doesn’t want Alice inside her apartment.

  “No, I couldn’t feel less comfortable than I do right now with that woman’s blood sticking to my chest. Is her place really nearby?”

  She directs this last at Kinsi, knowing she’ll get the truth.

  “Two minutes away.”

  Alice turns to face Nikki.

  “Let’s go, then,” she states. It’s not a request or a suggestion.

  Nikki looks trapped; one of the few occasions since they met when she doesn’t have a backup move. She sighs, downs her shot of whisky and gestures to go.

  Thirty seconds later they’re at street level, walking along Mullane once again. Alice gets fewer second looks than she would expect. She guesses the sight of someone walking along here covered in blood isn’t that rare, particularly in the company of Sergeant Freeman.

  Nikki is conspicuously shifty, eyes darting back and forth like she’s looking for a new option. Alice is starting to wonder if Nikki is about to take off again, prompting her thoughts to turn to when she took off last time.

  “You sure you don’t want it call it a night?” Nikki asks.

  “We’ve got plenty of work still to do.”

  “Okay, I get that, but wouldn’t you rather pop back to your own place to get changed? If you’re worried about losing track of me again, I’ll come with you back to Wheel Two.”

  “No. Your place is fine. We’re against the clock.”

  Alice didn’t lose track, she got abducted—the details of which Nikki has asked surprisingly few questions about.

  They are walking past Sin Garden, Nikki leading at a far slower clip than the last time they passed this way. Alice thinks about that mojito, how keen Nikki was for her to drink it.

  She skips back a few minutes, replaying the conversation in her head. As always, she has perfect recall.

  I woke up, I was strapped to a table and someone was hacking into my wrist unit, wiping my grabs.

  Who was he? You get a name?

  Alice never said it was a man. Maybe there were reasons she might make the assumption, but Alice suspects it’s because Nikki knew.

  There are some people who are concerned that you were backstage without a pass, so to speak, snooping where you weren’t welcome and witness to what you had no right to see.

  At the time, Alice couldn’t think what she had seen that might be damaging to anyone, when in fact everything she had seen was damaging to one person and one person only.

  Witness testimony doesn’t have the same traction without grabacións backing it up. Things tend to be a lot less binding when it comes down to “he said, she said.”

  After being conspicuously evasive all day, Freeman had undergone a volte-face, suddenly speaking candidly and behaving in an altogether less guarded manner. Alice now understands that it was because she had hit upon a plan to have her observer’s grabacións erased, reckoning nobody would believe Jessica’s word against hers.

  She thinks about how Nikki told her to stay put. She didn’t just take off, she told Alice she was taking off. She did it to make sure Alice would follow. She must have set it up with Lo-Jack and with the people Alice saw her wrestling down on the concourse.

  She sees also that when it came to getting her into that metal box, this was an elaborate contingency. There was a far simpler Plan A. She was supposed to drink the mojito. It was what they used to call a Mickey Finn, and this is why Alice feels a new kind of ire coursing through her. This, more than anything else, gives her the measure of Nicola Freeman’s ruthlessness.

  She tho
ught she would be drugging Jessica Cho, an inexperienced young intern on her first trip to CdC. When Jessica pitched up much later, she would be hung-over and disoriented, having lost her subject and had her observation files erased. She would be an inexperienced young girl who was dazzled by the Mullane neon, fell into temptation and got drunk when she was supposed to be carrying out her duties.

  Nobody would believe anything she said about Nikki. She would be fired, sent home in disgrace, her career over before it even started. And it was nothing personal. Jessica was merely an obstacle in Freeman’s way. A problem to be Fixxed.

  Was Dev Korlakian a problem to be Fixxed too? she begins to wonder. She can’t trust anything Nikki has said about him or about Julio Martinez, and certainly not about Yoram Ben Haim.

  It is with a chill that Alice remembers she is still in Nikki’s cross hairs: a far more dangerous problem than when Nikki thought she was merely Jessica. And she has just talked her way into going back with her to Nikki’s apartment.

  They turn the corner into a far narrower thoroughfare, a gloomy and claustrophobic passageway where little light can penetrate between the buildings. She can see the dark panels where elements have burned out and never been replaced. It feels like an old place somehow, her mind drawing upon images from Victorian stories, where lanes and alleyways gave shelter for the darkest deeds.

  There is barely room for two people to pass each other, but this matters little, as she sees no other people.

  No witnesses, she thinks.

  Did Nikki pull that reverse bluff on her again? Demonstrably trying to put Alice off coming here so that she would be all the more determined to follow?

  No. She’s getting paranoid now. There is a witness: Kinsi knows they are headed to Nikki’s place. And Nikki definitely didn’t want that to happen.

  Nikki leads her into a cramped vestibule, with a vending machine squeezed into a tight space between the door and the staircase.

  There is a Chinese lady coming down the stairs slowly. She looks matronly, not a sight Alice has seen often around here; like somebody’s grandma. She gives Nikki a cursory acknowledgement but stares curiously at Alice for a duration that strays well into rudeness, before proceeding into the alley.