Places in the Darkness

by Chris Brookmyre

  She’s carrying an electro-pulse and a resin gun. At this distance she could neutralise one of them with the jizz cannon, get off two shots if she is lucky. The zapper is a direct-contact weapon, good for one-on-one. There is no way of running these numbers that shows her winning this fight, and everybody in the room knows it.

  “See, I sussed that message had to be from you, ’cause I knew you’d been sniffing around NutriGen,” Julio says. “Take it as a double-edged compliment. I figured, who else would be smart enough to work out my deal with the tequila? And who else would be dumb enough to back herself into this rat trap?”

  “I’m not the one being dumb here. Believe me, you don’t want to do this.”

  “Believe me, we really do. Reckon we’ll score ourselves some points with Boutsikari and the FNG by being such good citizens. Maybe even get us a reward.”

  They’re all around her now, only a few metres away.

  “Julio, I’m trying to warn you. I’m not the one walking into a trap.”

  It’s as she says this that the lights go out.

  PREMIUM CHANNELS

  Alice does not return to her accommodation in the Ver Eterna. It would just take too long to travel all the way back to Wheel Two and she wants to stay close to the action in case of any developments. Instead she asks Boutsikari for a recommendation and makes her way to the Armstrong Hotel on Garneau, where an FNG account gets her a room.

  Garneau was CdC’s commercial and admin district before Wheel Two was built and the Armstrong its favoured bolthole for VIPs on short-term visits, but its history and comparative grandeur are redundant as far as Alice is concerned. She only needs two things: someplace to lie down and a comms terminal to connect to while she waits for FNG’s tech people to fix her lens. They’ve been working remotely to reset her database connection at source. If they haven’t cracked it in the next few hours, she will need to head back to HQ on Central Plaza to be fitted with new hardware.

  The room is cramped compared to the Ver Eterna, a legacy of times when space was at more of a premium rather than a testament to the FNG’s budget. She takes off her shoes, a sensual experience on its own comparable to stepping into a warm bath, and flops down on the narrow bed.

  The clock says 04:12 but these are merely numbers. She’s so tired she can’t even remember whether this is stating Greenwich Mean Time, the time in New York when she left or the time at Ocean Terminal where she boarded the elevator. Nor does she have the clarity to work out which phase any of them relates to.

  It’s bedtime. That’s the only time that matters.

  She doesn’t go to sleep though, not right away. First she’s got to perform some damage limitation of her own, having decided that the only way to mitigate the coming fallout from FNG is to be the one who breaks it to them.

  She connects to the room’s terminal, instantly turning one wall into a screen, which she promptly reduces with a gesture until it is a less overwhelming size. The default settings flood her with a dozen feeds she would have had muted on her lens, some public, some privileged. So much information but no real news. There have been no reliable sightings of Nikki, though she does spot a report of a contaminant alert around Mullane. Going by the time it was triggered, she figures that was probably her creating a distraction to cover her retreat, but it offers no clue as to where she was heading.

  She wonders where Nikki is; and not merely in the way the Seguridad are desperate to locate her. She is trying to picture her, imagine how she is doing, what is going through her head. Nikki is a presence unlike any that Alice has known, and part of her doesn’t want to believe she is really responsible for what she is being accused. It’s Alice’s job to clean things up, but she can already see how CdC would be a duller place without Nikki in it.

  Alice composes herself on the edge of the bed and sends out her request to the Chair of the FNG’s Oversight Committee, to whom Alice reports. Most people on Earth could name the FNG’s current President and at least their own country’s Prime Representative to the Federation, but few people outside political circles will have heard of Aurelia Ochoba. This is intentional, because when it comes to CdC, it is the person in her position who holds the true power at the FNG.

  As she waits for a reply, she checks her image in the frame and runs a hand though her tangled hair. She is wondering whether it would make a better impression to look respectfully smart or bedraggled by her exhausting efforts when Ochoba’s face suddenly appears on the screen.

  She is at home in Lagos, Nigeria. Alice is too tired to work out what the time is there, but she can tell she got Ochoba out of bed and she doesn’t look thrilled about it. The Chair knows she wouldn’t do this unless it was important, but Alice suspects she’s not going to be any happier when she finds out quite how important.

  “We’ve got a major situation up here,” she begins, and proceeds to fill in Ochoba on everything she had previously been so diligently suppressing.

  Even as she speaks her opening words she realises how skewed is the Earth’s perspective upon its effective first colony: like a too-precious child, obsessively fussed-over and in danger of being spoilt as a result.

  It’s not a major situation. It’s a murder hunt, like is probably happening within a few miles of where Ochoba sits now, like is probably happening in every major city on Earth. Everything up here is always amplified and extrapolated, everyone down below permanently overanxious at their perceived stake in the great game.

  And some stakes are bigger than others. History’s most complex public-private partnership, the world’s largest super-corporations ostensibly locked into a pact of mutual cooperation, but in reality battling to slice up its biggest-ever pie. Ochoba’s talent is in navigating the treacherous waters between the Quadriga and FNG, as the latter endeavours to maintain some control of where its constituent nations’ money is being spent. But they both know that is nothing compared to the factionalism within the Quadriga, which is in a state of permanent conflict with itself.

  Alice can’t help but think of Nikki Freeman and her talk of how the perceived criminality on CdC is a mere distraction to keep people’s eyes off the bigger games being played elsewhere.

  Ochoba is impassive as always, concealing her anger and dismay behind her usual façade. Nonetheless, she seldom leaves anyone in any doubt as to where she believes their shortcomings lie.

  “You admit you were complicit in concealing this initial murder from us?” she asks, her tone an audible affidavit.

  Alice isn’t ready to sign any confessions.

  “I believed I could learn considerably more about how things really work up here if I let things play out, particularly having found myself in a position of advantage during a moment of crisis. To come in heavy-handed at such a time, as a newcomer and an outsider, would have been to waste that advantage.”

  Ochoba stares back at her, a tactic that usually prompts the speaker to rethink their defiance. Maybe it’s the perspective of distance, maybe it’s the time delay or maybe she’s just tired, but whatever, it isn’t working on Alice right now.

  “I know there’s a major storm brewing over all this, but I’m willing to bet I’ve given you more valuable information in the past five minutes than Hoffman gave you in the past five years.”

  Ochoba continues to stare, but it’s not theatre. She’s ruminating.

  “Okay, point taken,” she eventually replies. “But let’s not keep each other in the dark from here on in.”

  Ochoba ends the transmission. Alice is left staring at a blank screen, reflecting on what she was intended to infer from the Chair’s final words. When the storm breaks below, Alice will want to be aware of the political machinations that ensue. Ochoba is reminding her that she can choke off the umbilical if she feels the information isn’t flowing in both directions.

  ENHANCED INTERROGATION

  It takes Nikki a moment to understand that the blackout is not part of Julio’s plan, and another to remember that she has an infrared setting
on her lens. It’s standard issue for Seguridad, but for everybody else it’s an expensive optional insurance against an eventuality that almost never happens.

  It doesn’t kick in automatically, because nobody wants that happening every time they turn out the light, but the option to trigger it does flash up in response to the lens detecting a sudden widening of her pupil.

  She can tell which of the others has it instantly. Those without are frozen to the spot, heads jerking around as they search reflexively for a light source. Julio and Dade, by contrast, look first at each other. They’re checking in, questioning what their move should be, wondering if they missed something and are about to pay a price.

  Nikki reacts quicker than either of them. She doesn’t have to check with anybody. She draws and hits Julio with the resin gun. He reads her move and he’s quick, so it’s slightly off-target, but she gets lucky. The cum-shot glues his right arm to his side and partially attaches him to one of the night-blinded pair.

  She zig-zags as Dade lunges for her, catching him with the electro-pulse en passant. He’s a big guy so it doesn’t drop him, but he’s reeling and dizzy as she runs for an exit.

  She’s outside the octagon now, in the maze of passageways that she had little choice but to put between her rendezvous and the nearest point of egress. It all looks different in the infrared too, which isn’t going to make her navigation any easier, but the situation is still way better than it looked ten seconds ago.

  She stops at a junction, trying to remember the way, expecting to hear footsteps hurrying behind her. Instead she hears screams. She can’t tell whose, but she’s not so curious that she’s going to turn back and investigate. She makes it to an exterior door, one that opens right on to Hadfield, except that it doesn’t open at all. An overlay on her lens confirms that it is locked and reminds her that she has no override authorisation, as her Seguridad credentials have been suspended.

  She needs another out. She can hear more cries, more screams. The last thing she wants is to return towards the octagon, but to find an alternative exit she’ll need to follow the adjoining corridor, which unavoidably takes her back towards the centre. She proceeds more cautiously, the sound of her own breathing loud in her ears.

  The screams have stopped, and she is sure she hears footsteps, but they are not heavy and lumbering like Freitas or Dade. They are swift and light, a whisper echoing around the walls.

  She is midway along the passage when a figure looms into view from around a corner, cutting off her path. It is Sol Freitas. She knew he had to be in here somewhere: probably deployed to secure the perimeter and make sure Nikki didn’t have any hidden backup. From his gait, not to mention the look of focused determination on his snarling puss, he is tricked out for night vision too. He is also toting a telescopic whip-cosh.

  Nikki reaches for the resin gun. There is an orange warning light blinking on the handle, indicating it isn’t ready to fire. That’s bullshit, she thinks. The reload time is like a second and a half.

  She looks closer, sees that it is reading “chamber empty.”

  She curses her own sloppy practice. She can’t remember the last time she fired the thing before today, but evidently she didn’t reload after and she sure as shit didn’t check it before duty any time since.

  She thinks about drawing anyway as a deterrent, but Freitas looks like he has sussed her hesitancy. He starts to charge, his muscular frame pounding the floor with each footfall. He’s a mass of white in her vision, growing against the blackness as he picks up speed.

  Something flashes past on her left, then it’s to the right, then left again. It is a human figure, jarringly fleet, impossibly nimble. It seems slight, but perhaps only because of the speed, grace and balance with which it moves. The figure is a white streak, human tracer fire in Nikki’s lens, but she is sure she is looking at a woman. She ricochets off the walls, part bullet, part ballet, her angle of approach surely impossible for her target to track.

  A second ago Freitas seemed a juggernaut. Now he is like a lumbering quadruped being picked at by an airborne predator.

  She takes him down in the blink of an eye. Nikki hears snicking sounds accompanied by gasps and moans, a spray of white arcing across the corridor. Then she sees the assassin drag Freitas around the corner. He looks like he should be too heavy for her to move, but she somehow manages his fall, using gravity to create momentum as she drives him backwards and out of sight.

  She hears a voice. It is too quiet to make out the words, but the tone is insistent, punctuated by strangulated replies, cries of agony. Freitas is being interrogated.

  Tortured.

  Nikki stands motionless for a second. She often asks herself whether there is any part of her that is still a cop, and not some glorified security guard taking every last dollar she can skim. She gets her answer in that moment. She has to help Freitas. She has little confidence that she can, but she needs to try, or she’ll know there truly is nothing left of who she once was.

  All she has is a dart gun with zero stopping power, and the electro-pulse baton, which is only useful in close combat. Having seen her move, Nikki sincerely doubts she would get anywhere near this acrobatic assailant. She proceeds nonetheless. There’s no way out behind her anyway.

  She sees a white pool on the floor as she nears the junction between corridors, fading as it cools.

  Freitas is sitting against the wall a few metres around the corner, his hands on his belly, his head slumped onto his chest. The assassin is gone. Nikki can’t hear any footsteps, only the echoes of desperate cries from deeper inside the building: voices fading, life ebbing.

  Freitas raises his head as she approaches, begins reaching towards her, stops himself. That’s when she sees that he needs both hands to hold in his guts. There are tiny stab wounds in multiple strategic locations, surgically precise, and one deep slash across his abdomen. She flashes back to Omega’s crime scene, that nightmare orrery floating in the Axle.

  Freitas tries again to reach for her, using his arm to keep pressure on this one wound, while six or seven others gape and bleed. His eyes are pleading. He knows what’s coming. He doesn’t want to die alone.

  Nikki crouches beside him, places a hand on his forearm.

  “I’m here,” she says. It seems stupid, redundant, banal, but it’s all she can offer.

  Blood seeps over his arm and on to her fingers. The warmth of it is a wrench in its familiarity. She’s been here before.

  “Who did this to you?” she asks, bringing her mind back to the immediate. She can’t let herself be taken there. Not now. Not ever.

  “Guess you were right … about that tiger,” he replies, wincing with the effort.

  “What is this alliance? Who has Julio been dealing with? Believe me, I don’t think he’ll be caring much if you tell me.”

  Freitas looks at her, the intensity of his stare weirdly amplified by the negative effect of his widening pupils being white.

  “Doesn’t matter,” he rasps. “They’ll be dead soon too. Ate the forbidden fruit. Maybe just touched the tree. We’re not supposed to have it. Nobody’s supposed to have it. They’re coming to get it back.”

  “Knows about what? Who’s coming?”

  He swallows, fighting for the breath to speak.

  “Project Sentinel. Anyone who even knows about it is a target. It’s the touch of death.”

  His face contorts in what she thinks is pain but is in fact Freitas enjoying his last laugh.

  “And I just gave it to you.”

  The lights come back on, finding Nikki standing in a corridor over Freitas’s lifeless corpse. There is no more screaming, no more cries or moans, only silence. A dead silence.

  She proceeds towards the centre. She’s got her electro-pulse baton drawn, for what it’s worth. She doesn’t think she’s going to encounter anybody, or stand a chance if she does.

  She tries toggling through the surveillance feeds, but they aren’t coming up. The cameras have been killed.
<
br />   Them and everybody else.

  The octagon is a slaughterhouse: four bodies scattered about the floor.

  For better or worse—usually worse—Julio has been part of her life as long as Nikki cares to remember. A problem, an irritation, an enemy. The rival bootlegging was just a stupid game, like she told Alice: a petty distraction among the insignificant, one she never really expected to be over.

  Yoram didn’t want this. Nobody should want this. But somebody had.

  Three of them look like they were despatched swiftly, but only so that there was time and space to work on Julio. He has this twisted, horrified expression. It was his voice, his screams that she heard. Nikki knew it at the time, but didn’t want to admit it to herself.

  The assassin tortured him, and longer than she tortured Freitas, but she nonetheless worked quickly. She wanted to know something, or maybe merely to satisfy herself that he didn’t know something. Either way, she’s looking at a cleaning-up operation, just like Freitas suggested.

  Begging the question: why is Nikki still alive?

  A live image blinks into her lens, showing another of Julio’s men lying dead in a passageway. The security cameras are back on.

  And now she has her answer.

  The cameras recorded Julio and his men entering the octagon to talk to Nikki just before the lights went out. When they come back on, the playback will show her standing over all their bodies.

  She tried to tell Julio that this phony turf war was being used as cover for a larger agenda. Now he and half his crew have been taken out, and Nikki set up to take the rap so that nobody goes looking for the real reason they died. She doesn’t know what that was, but according to Freitas it was something they knew, something they saw, something they took.

  She has the answer to another question too. This settles any lingering bullshit about blackouts, about her possibly doing stuff she couldn’t remember. She was wide awake when this happened and it sure as shit wasn’t her.