Alice is still spinning from Boutsikari’s intervention when she feels as much as hears this deep, grinding crunch. It is like that moment just before a train or a bus comes to a stop, when she can still sense the forward momentum. Except that when the wheel stops, that momentum is multiplied by a hundred, and there’s no gravity to stop her after the jolt.
The ground stops and Alice simply doesn’t. She is pitched forward, pinballing off other bodies, but slowing enough that she thinks she can grab a railing coming up ahead. As she reaches for it, someone else barrels helplessly into her, and a moment later she is shooting up towards the canopy with disproportionate velocity.
It wasn’t the collision, she realises, but a vent. The bump knocked her into its path, only for a moment, but without gravity to retard her progress, the air resistance is no match for a fan-driven current. It sends her rising at speed, like a leaf on the wind.
She braces for contact with the canopy, reassuring herself it only looks like glass, and somehow manages to flip herself so that it is her feet that hit the transparent barrier between the wheel and open space. The impact is felt mostly in her knees, and once again seems disproportionate, this time in a kinder way, reminding her that her legs are only absorbing the force of an air vent, after all.
She rebounds with considerably reduced energy, floating very slowly downwards into open space above the plaza. Below her she can see dozens of people, all still somehow on the ground. Looking closer she observes that they are now tethered to fixed objects or to each other, from lines clipped to their waists or wrists. Among the crowds, if they even noticed the shooter, he will have been forgotten in what happened next.
Not so hard to spot the new girl, she thinks, which is when she realises that if she was the shooter’s intended victim, then she is now presenting a very easy target. She thinks of the man who was staring at her. The shooter was wearing a mask but it had to be him. He was standing in roughly the same spot.
She looks at her arm and sees blood drift from it in tiny red balls.
The wound is not what she was expecting. There is a plastic dart sticking from her forearm. It is about half the length of her thumb, and only embedded in the top half-centimetre of skin. Best not pull it out though, she reasons, but she knows nobody is going to kill her with one of these. Down on the terrace, she can see that the people around Gonçalves have relaxed their state of alertness, some even laughing with relief. With the gravity off, there is no option for anybody to go chasing down the gunman, even if they had noted what he looked like, but from their subsequent reactions she discerns that whatever just happened, it wasn’t an assassination attempt.
Then as she reaches a height of around fifty or sixty feet, she hears another shudder that confirms how being shot again with a dart gun is not the biggest danger facing her right now. If the wheel could stop without notice, then it could restart at any second too.
Her heart is racing but she is resistant to the idea of calling for help. She doesn’t want the first thing anybody knows about her to be the fact that she had to be rescued while everybody who was used to the place dealt calmly with the emergency. She was totally unprepared, however. Not only did they equip themselves with retractable tethers, but as she looks down she can see several people using compressed air canisters as propulsion devices. A handful are employing them to guide themselves back to ground where they can find anchor, but the majority are engaged in a pre-emptive clean-up operation. Hotel and restaurant staff are expertly directing themselves into position to retrieve glasses and crockery, while using suction devices to trap balls of fluid.
“It’s so they don’t short anything,” says a woman’s voice. It comes from behind Alice, but she can’t immediately see where.
“When the wheel turns again and it all goes splat,” she continues, “you’d be amazed where fluids can end up.”
Alice gets a fix on the source. She is rising gently from beneath and to her right, expertly discharging blasts of air from a cylinder the size of a marker pen. It is the woman Hoffman led away. Her expression doesn’t look quite so severe now, but perhaps this is merely because Alice is grateful for her approach.
Upon the woman’s invitation, Alice offers a hand, expecting it to be gripped. Instead she extends a tether from a wristband and attaches it to a belt-loop on Alice’s waist.
“Thank you,” Alice says meekly.
“Didn’t they give you one of these?” the woman asks.
Alice is not sure whether she means the wrist utility or the air cylinder. She is about to say no when she flashes back to a welcome pack that was waiting for her on the bed in her hotel room. She must have flaked out last night, meaning to open it in the morning, but she hurried out without doing so.
“I’m Helen, by the way,” she says in an accent suggesting she just got here from the Deep South. “Helen Petitjean.”
Alice is about to introduce herself but remembers it would be redundant. She decides to do so anyway. Some archive inside her head just relayed the notion that Southerners traditionally place a premium on politeness, so she opts to go with it.
“Alice Blake. Pleased to meet you, and many thanks for going to this trouble.”
“My pleasure.”
And your opportunity, Alice thinks.
Happy that the tether is secure, Helen fires a few bursts of air and gently directs them not down, but towards the roof of a nearby building.
A plate spins through the air and Helen minutely corrects her course to avoid it.
“I don’t have a free hand,” she explains. “And I see you’ve injured yours.”
“It’s not serious.”
“Best not take the dart out for now,” Helen counsels.
Alice sees the plate clip the edge of the building. It drifts there gently, but the momentum is enough for the impact to fragment it into several shards.
“Shouldn’t they be unbreakable?” Alice suggests. “Plastic, maybe?”
“It’s remarkable what you come to consider an exquisite luxury,” Helen replies. “But eating off china is definitely one of mine. The more advanced our technology, the more we appreciate basic tactile things.”
“Such as my feet touching the ground,” Alice agrees, as they skate between rows of rooftop vegetation, coming in fast. They skim off the surface of the topsoil and Helen skilfully uses the cylinder to brake so that she can grip a handrail before they float off again. Alice notices a tiny scar in the surface where her heel clipped what turns out to be a transparent membrane keeping the soil in place.
“You’re going to encounter that a lot here: the constant struggle between the future and the past. Everything is really new and really old at the same time. Here on CdC we’re relying on infrastructure technology that was put in decades ago. It’s ancient compared to what people are used to on Earth. And yet other things are cutting edge because they are developed here.
“My background is architecture and city planning. I consult on designing habitat and social environment, both for CdC and for the Arca. The whole thing is an exercise in never knowing what you need until after you need it, discovering how every one of your contingencies creates new problems. One of the biggest dangers is thinking the tech you are developing will save you from more basic concerns. Future versus past.”
“You mean like how by creating artificial gravity, we no longer need to worry about stray fluids ending up where nobody anticipated?” Alice asks, as a volume of what she takes to be hot coffee floats past and just misses their heads.
“Well, precisely.”
Helen attaches a tether from her waist to a railing and begins to pull them both around the edge of the roof towards the entrance to a staircase.
“Is it about to start up again?” Alice asks, failing to keep a hint of concern from her voice.
“Oh, no. They’ll sound an alarm before they do that, give everybody time to get someplace secure.”
“How long is it likely to take?”
Helen shrugs.
“Could be twenty minutes, could be ten times that. The knock-on disruption will be longer, though. Won’t be any shuttles landing on this wheel until they’re sure all the systems are responding properly.”
Helen opens a roof-access door and tugs them both gently down the stairs into the uppermost storey of the building.
“We’ll be safe waiting it out in here,” she explains. “There are plenty of anchor points inside.”
They bob their way into a room where Helen detaches Alice’s tether and reattaches it to a shelving unit that proves bolted into the floor. It appears to be a storage room for materials used in cultivating the vegetation above, rooftops being used for agriculture on CdC like they might host solar panels on Earth.
“So what is it that you wanted to talk to me about?” Alice asks. “Or more pertinently, what is it that Hoffman and Boutsikari didn’t want you talking to me about?”
Helen seems momentarily surprised then acknowledges Alice’s candour with a knowing smile.
“Oh, they just don’t want anybody messing with the airbrushed brochure version of this place.”
“And what’s the non-airbrushed version?”
“Like I already told you: future versus past. The tension between the old and the new. This is the most advanced place in the history of human civilisation, and yet some people seem intent on recreating a mid-nineteenth-century frontier town, or maybe Chicago circa the 1920s.”
“I’ve heard there is an illegal alcohol trade,” Alice says. She thinks of the bar prices on the terrace. “I suppose that was inevitable.”
“That’s just the tip of the iceberg, honey. And it’s an iceberg on a collision course with the Titanic. You know, once upon a time, bloated executives went to South-East Asia on corporate junkets so they could screw prostitutes half their age, a hedonistic playground far away from prying eyes, husbands, wives and consequences. Now they’re getting that in space.”
“Prostitution?”
“Any fleshly indulgence you can think of, it’s on sale up here. And where there’s criminality and exploitation, there’s also violence, but you aren’t gonna hear about that from Boutsikari and Hoffman. With you coming in, I’m hoping things can change. See, they could clean it all up if there was a genuine will to do so.”
“So why wouldn’t they?”
Helen gives her a look that is pitying of Alice’s apparent naïveté. It’s a manner Alice has always found useful in encouraging people’s candour.
“What you see here, CdC, the Arca, this whole glorious undertaking has been a product of people sacrificing the short-term view for the greater good. Thinking about what is going to benefit us all in five hundred years and not what is gonna benefit yourself individually in the next ten minutes or the next financial quarter. Not everybody sees it like that, though. It’s human nature. Some folks are always gonna be looking to make hay and to build their little fiefdoms.”
“You’re saying one of those people is Boutsikari and one of those fiefdoms is the Seguridad?”
“If only it were that simple. There are fiefdoms within fiefdoms, powerbases within powerbases. The Seguridad is riven with corruption but Boutsikari is a political animal and a pragmatist. He subscribes to the argument that the illicit trades here aren’t doing any real harm, that they keep everything ticking over, but he is being dangerously negligent. There is tension in this place. You can feel it. And it’s building up to something bad, something explosive.”
“This is what you were going to talk to me about down on the terrace, in front of Hoffman and Boutsikari?”
Helen fixes her with a fiery stare.
“I most certainly was, and don’t you for one minute imagine otherwise. This whole mess is the result of keeping things under wraps that should be out in the open. I’d have let Boutsikari know that once you take over from Hoffman, I don’t expect things to simply keep ticking over.”
“And what is it you think I can do?”
“It’s what Boutsikari thinks you can do that matters. His great fear, one that is widely shared around the Quadriga, is that if they aren’t running a tight ship, you will report back with the recommendation that FNG takes over the policing of this place. If you let it be known you’d rather merely bring the Seguridad to heel, you’ll get the support and protection you’ll need.”
“Protection? So you’re anticipating that the people running these illegal operations will make me a target?”
“Naturally. If you can’t be bought—and I’m betting you can’t—then they’ll have to solve the problem some other way. But trust me, honey, the gangsters are not the people you need to worry about. The biggest threat is gonna come from the cops. So I’m about to do you a favour here and now by warning you who’s the most dangerous one …”