Places in the Darkness

by Chris Brookmyre

If the body at her apartment is any precedent, the Seguridad will be on their way here soon, probably following an anonymous tip or a silent alarm she would be seeing if she hadn’t been cut out of the loop. The net is closing. She’s got no friends to turn to and she’s even running out of enemies. But it’s not over. Not yet.

  She has nowhere left to run to, but she can still run to nowhere. With the authorities searching for her, her only option is to hide someplace the authorities don’t acknowledge exists.

  AFTER-EFFECTS

  Alice is woken by an incoming comms alert, rudely startling her into consciousness. At first she can’t work out where the sound is coming from, her woozy state taking its time to realise it’s internal, meaning her lens must be up and running again.

  She needs a few seconds before she can respond, muting the alert but not answering yet while she waits for her head to clear. Why does this keep happening? Again, it feels as though her brain is booting up in stages, with her short-term memory in particular taking the longest time to right itself.

  She checks the time and calculates that she has been out for at least seven hours. That should have been enough to thoroughly recharge but she feels like she could use seven hours more. All her limbs are heavy, as though she’s run ten miles and swum five. Perhaps this is a result of her body adjusting to art-grav, or maybe in this case the after-effects of whatever she was drugged with on her way to Trick’s. She doesn’t know, but either way she could seriously use some coffee.

  She recalls her previous scorn for people when she heard them say that. She privately derided their weakness in needing a stimulant merely to start the day, or even to get over their indulgence the night before, evidence of still another weakness in terms of will-power, discipline and self-restraint. But right now, she knows she is going to struggle to perform the simplest of tasks unless she gets hold of some rich, hot, bitter, black and unadulteratedly caffeinated espresso.

  She connects the comm. It’s Boutsikari.

  “Did it all get sorted while I was sleeping?” she asks groggily.

  “Not exactly. You need to come to Habitek over on Hadfield right away. There’s something you have to see, and you best not have breakfast first.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am, but I’m afraid the premises are closed due to an incident and there’s no admittance without authorisation.”

  The Seguridad officer on the door at Habitek is polite but insistent, though he straightens just a little to emphasise his greater bulk in case Alice should attempt to get past him.

  She is about to state her case with equally polite insistence when she sees Boutsikari over the officer’s shoulder, waving to her from down the corridor inside.

  “Let her through,” he calls, prompting the guard to step aside.

  “Thank you,” Alice says to both of them, though she blends a note of query into her tone in order to convey her annoyance at not being admitted at once.

  “You do realise you’re still identifying as Wendy Goodfellow?” Boutsikari tells her.

  He questioned her regarding it yesterday, and in response she explained about her abduction and interactions with the since also-abducted Trick. At the time she had no means of changing her ID profile, but her lens system is fully functioning now. She restores her correct credentials, noting that Trick was as good as his word: she now has the option to switch between multiple fake personae.

  “As we feared, the shit has hit the fan down below,” Boutsikari says, guiding her along a twisting corridor deeper into the Habitek complex. “It’s early yet in terms of the political fallout, but from the media response you’d think it was the first murder ever, never mind the first murder in space.”

  “I informed Aurelia Ochoba myself,” Alice tells him. “I reckoned it best if she discovered first-hand.”

  “How’d she take it?”

  “Do you know her at all?”

  “We’ve spoken a few times.”

  “Then you know it’s not her reaction you need to be concerned about.”

  “Quite. That part’s out of our hands. The politicians can all wave their hands around and have their tantrums. Meantime all we can do is our jobs.”

  “And how is that working out?”

  “Slowly but surely, like all good police work. We got confirmation that Selby was pregnant and we’ve had officers all over Mullane asking questions, trying to find the father. No joy on that score yet, but what we did discover is that Selby owed Freeman money.”

  “She’s a shylock too?”

  “No, more like protection subs. A lot of the girls—and the boys—paid Freeman so they could work for themselves, keep would-be pimps off their backs. But it gets worse. The word is that Selby was saving money because she wanted to keep the baby. She was on a two-year contract so she needed to pay for an early ticket home. She had been avoiding Freeman and Freeman knew it.”

  Alice feels a shudder of revulsion.

  “A few hours ago I believed Nikki Freeman to be merely someone who encapsulates all that is rotten on CdC,” she says. “But it’s starting to appear that she personally accounts for a large percentage of it.”

  “Believe me,” Boutsikari replies. “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

  He leads her towards a wide octagonal chamber at the heart of the building, across the entrance to which her lens overlays a visual barrier denoting it a crime scene. Jaganathan is standing in front of the doorway, expectant.

  She can smell the blood before she reaches the open door. There are four bodies lying on the floor, dead from stab and slash wounds. Two of them are entangled, stuck together by a discharge from a resin gun.

  “That’s Julio Martinez,” Alice observes, her lens identifying one of the conjoined corpses.

  “There are two more elsewhere in the building,” Boutsikari says. “I’m informed that these were all known associates of Martinez.”

  Alice notes the “I’m informed.” Still protecting his deniability, maybe all the more as the bodies pile up and CdC’s hidden face is revealed to the world below.

  Alice notices an incoming grab appear in her lens.

  “It’s playback from the security cameras,” Boutsikari says. “You should take a look.”

  Alice watches Nikki Freeman standing only a couple of paces from where she is now, the image superimposing on the scene before her eyes. Martinez and his three accomplices are surrounding her. There is audio too.

  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.

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

  Everything goes dark. Alice hears scuffling, shouts, the discharge of a resin gun, then screams. So many screams.

  Jaganathan notices her wince.

  “It’s like that for a few minutes. You best skip forward to when the lights come back on.”

  When the image is restored, it shows Freeman standing over the bodies, trembling with exertion, blood smeared on her clothes.

  “Was this an ambush?” Alice asks. “More of Ben Haim’s people moving in when the lights went out?”

  “Yoram Ben Haim is adamant he had nothing to do with this. He says she’s gone rogue. Gone insane. I’m inclined to believe him.”

  “Could she have done this all on her own?”

  “She’s highly trained,” says Jaganathan. “Equipped with night vision, infrared. She put a lot of men down in her LA days. We figure she lured them here: maybe making them think they could bring her in, claim a reward and get her out of the picture as a twofer. Then she cut the lights and slaughtered everybody while they were stumbling around blind.”

  “We gotta throw a net around this bitch,” Boutsikari growls. “I’m concerned that Ben Haim is right and she’s escalating into some kind of psychosis. We’ve been lucky in that this bloodbath is behind closed doors, but people already know she killed S
elby, and since that got out, the lid has come off the Omega thing too. There’s all kinds of rumours going around. All it would take is for Freeman to attack some civilian and we’d have a widespread panic on our hands.”

  “So where the hell is she?” Alice asks. “I know I’m new around here but I wouldn’t have thought it possible to hide for very long in a city where she literally can’t show her face in public without raising the alarm.”

  “Unfortunately for us, if anyone on Seedee could pull that off, it would be Freeman.”

  GHOSTS

  Nikki has no choice but to take a static, and not just because where she’s headed is halfway around the wheel. She’s going to be in plain sight, but it’s the only shot she has at this point, and she needs to take it fast.

  She searches around Habitek for anything she might use to reduce her visibility. In a lab close to the octagon she finds a set of hazard coveralls which will conceal the bloodstains streaking her clothes. Less helpfully, it has a name badge sewn on, reading “Roger Searle,” and she definitely doesn’t look like a Roger. Maybe if she can also find a cap and a pair of protective glasses she can carry it off, she reckons, spotting a hopper with all kinds of junk spilling out of it.

  Rooting through it, the contents don’t turn out to be work materials but stuff left over from the party they must have thrown here when they finished work on their new module before everybody decanted to the Axle. Looks like they used the fabricator to make joke face masks of each other, an office-party cliché that refuses to die. Nothing that will fool anybody, or even register a false ID on the worst facial-recognition scan, but it gives her something to work with. She can act like she’s on her way back from a night out with colleagues.

  She finds some Qolas nobody drunk, meaning they must also have had some decent liquor at this shindig. Nikki opens one of them and pours it over the coveralls. Just in case she isn’t giving off enough of a booze smell already.

  It takes her ten minutes to walk to Hadfield station. She leaves the mask off but the cap on for the first part of the trek, keeping her head down as she passes the few people who are on the street right then. If nobody can get a look at her face, then their lenses can’t scan her.

  She pulls the mask on once she’s in sight of the station. There are two officers watching the entrance, standard deployment. The Seguridad aren’t expecting to apprehend her walking into the station: it’s to prevent her getting around using the statics.

  She staggers a little as she approaches them, afraid they can hear her heartbeat from where they’re standing. She measures her gait so that she appears sufficiently wobbly as to seem tipsy, but not enough to look like she’s going to be a problem. It’s a narrow margin of error, but she has first-hand knowledge of how cops calibrate this scale.

  Her pulse doesn’t stop pounding as she boards the car and takes a seat, though the whole time she has to act like she’s got a healthy buzz on and doesn’t have a care in the world or off it. The car goes past Malhotra, Faris, passengers getting on and off, nobody paying her any mind. Then as it approaches Gutierrez, she feels a hand on her arm.

  Without looking up she can see from the uniform trousers that it’s a Seguridad officer.

  “Hey.”

  So near and yet so far.

  She glances up, every sinew tensing.

  “This your stop? Thought you might be nodding off there, buddy.”

  She lets out an involuntary jet of breath, which she disguises as a chuckle of relief.

  “Thank you, officer,” she says, keeping her voice hoarse like she’s been talking loud all night.

  She sees him eyeing the name badge, knows everything is being recorded. Shit. If anything belatedly strikes him as suspicious, she doesn’t want him knowing which station she was headed for.

  She gets off at Gutierrez, and fortunately he doesn’t, or she’d have had to walk out and double back. She waits a nerve-shredding twenty minutes on the platform, expecting cops to storm in at any second, then gets the next car to Garneau.

  She doesn’t have to worry about officers guarding the entrance at this end of the trip. She isn’t going up that high. She walks along the platform until her lens shows her a code request, identifying the location of a concealed door. She sends her response and it unlocks, swinging outward from what had appeared to be an advertising screen. Workers passing through Garneau and Dunbar must see people slip in and out of these doors every day, but they don’t think anything of it. Even if they are mildly curious as to where these folks are coming from, they are rendered invisible by the Seedee straight-arrow assumption that everybody is busy doing what they’re supposed to.

  These hidden doors are ideally located for slipping into the stream of ordinary citizens, entering and exiting the static system as they go about their daily business. It disguises that the people coming in and out of here are Seedee’s true dispossessed, its literal underclass.

  You see someone heading down towards the Garneau static and maybe assume they’re heading home at the end of a shift like the rest of the folks on their phase. Technically you’d be right, but if they pass through that hidden door, they aren’t going back to some des-res apartment. Or even a shitty one like Nikki’s.

  It’s known as the Catacombs, or sometimes Ghost Town on account of who lives there: Seedee’s invisible population. People who are not supposed to be here. People who lost their contract but didn’t want to leave. People who were never supposed to be on Seedee in the first place: smuggled themselves up, probably alongside the corpses of three others whose jerry-rigged air supplies and untested knock-off pressure suits failed.

  As a Seguridad officer she would occasionally be asked to investigate an abscondence: that was when someone had their contract cancelled and subsequently never reported for the final processing ahead of their appointed shuttle to take them to Heinlein. The Quadriga never really wanted her to look too hard. For one thing, they know they can always sell that seat. Even at a few hours’ notice, there is always a standby waiting list.

  But that wasn’t the main reason.

  The people living in the Catacombs aren’t down here because they’re hiding from the authorities. It’s because where else are they going to live if they can’t get a job that pays the rent? That’s another reason this place doesn’t officially exist, and the Quadriga aren’t in a hurry to do anything about it. A lot of companies hire ghosts because they can get a job of work out of them for a pittance, and it’s not like the ghosts are in a position to negotiate. It pushes up profits and drives down wages for the officially registered workers in certain blue-collar sectors. Hence so many of the legitimate employees on Seedee are working extra jobs; whether that’s double-phase moonlighting or more proscribed activities.

  It’s a shanty town warren, constructed of the remnants of the cramped zero-g habitation modules that were used in the very origins of what became the Axle, back when it resembled an amped-up version of the ISS. Nothing up here is ever truly junked, so once the first art-grav quadrant became inhabitable, these modules were gradually abandoned. What fixtures and materials couldn’t be recycled were put into storage someplace and forgotten about, until somebody found a belated use for them a few decades later.

  On the maps and schematics it appears as part of the static network, officially a siding yard for storage and maintenance of the passenger cars. It sits beneath so many buildings that it is unclear who technically controls the space, and with it being under so many different companies, a lot of people have had to be paid to look the other way or not ask any questions. Nikki knows this because she’s one of them.

  Somebody is controlling it, though; somebody is collecting rent, which is another reason its ongoing existence is tolerated. First principle of the Quadriga’s ideology: if it’s making money for somebody and not hurting anybody else, it’s cool. And by somebody and anybody, they mean among themselves, obviously.

  Nikki wanders between the rows of pods, ducking now and again where overhe
ad ducts reduce the clearance. Even where they don’t it feels claustrophobic. It’s hot and humid down here too, and though it is connected to water and sewage systems, there’s no getting around the fact that it smells pretty rank.

  Looking at the people huddled in these pods, she has to wonder how bad their life must have been back on Earth that they’d rather stay up here even if it means living like this. But maybe she ought to wonder how much they must hate themselves that they’d rather stay here as a ghost than go back to being the person they once were.

  Yeah, that’s a question she understands.

  Nikki thinks of the horrible, burning shame she felt when Alice insisted on coming back to her place. She knows Kinsi didn’t mean any harm, but she could have slapped her for suggesting it. Nikki tried her hardest to put her off, laying down hints about the mutual awkwardness that any woman ought to have picked up on. Whether Alice had an insider instruction to go there she’ll never know, but the reason Nikki didn’t want her in her apartment was not because she knew there was a dead girl in her bedroom.

  It was because she didn’t want that stuck-up, Ivy League, blue-blood G2S child to see what Nikki’s world was reduced to. Forty-five years old and living alone in this soulless little shoebox with nothing to show for her life.

  Plenty of people on Seedee live frugally, renting equally small and sparsely fitted pads, but that is usually because they are saving as much as they can. With some, usually the younger ones, it’s to build a nest egg for when they return to Earth. Others have no intention of going home, but they’re saving money to send nonetheless—to people they’re trying to make it up to; oftentimes people who don’t want them to come back.

  Nikki doesn’t even have that as an excuse. Instead she is part of another common Seedee constituency: spending everything she makes in pursuit of a hedonistic numbness because she has no meaningful purpose up above or down below. She’s as lost as any ghost in the Catacombs. It took her a while but she’s finally found her way down here where she belongs.