It’s the smell of food that tips the balance.
Alice is standing with her arms folded, facing down Nikki and creating a stand-off via the simple expedient of refusing to keep walking down Mullane. The weakness in this strategy is that Freeman could decide to resume her hurried stomp towards the static station, which would require Alice to follow in the service of her role as official observer Jessica Cho. If Nikki calls her bluff, she doesn’t have a play, so she needs to come up with a move before that happens, or accept the consolation prize of merely staying close to her subject.
She wants to observe Freeman here, in her natural habitat. That, after all, is the point of the exercise.
Mullane is a narrow channel compared to what she’s seen on W2, but broad for an older district. It looks wider the busier it gets, the bustle of human traffic emphasising the distance between facing shop fronts by filling it with colour and movement. The air here feels warmer than over on Central Plaza, even though the thermometer is stating that it’s within the same range as everywhere else. It must be the cooking odours, the thump of music and the sense of a throng. It makes her feel outdoors, but in a different way from how Central Plaza feels like outdoors. Over there it’s like it’s always daytime, always morning, even: breezy and fresh. Here, in keeping with what she has been told, it always feels like night, and a muggy summer night at that.
“He gave us some pointers though. If Korlakian got into fights, shouldn’t we be finding out with whom and about what? It strikes me as unlikely this will all turn out to be about his day job. He had to have been dabbling in other things.”
She’s still waiting for a response. Freeman is weighing things up, but it’s only a matter of time before she starts asking herself who this little girl thinks she is, to be criticising her investigation like this.
“Why do you want me out of Mullane so fast?” Alice asks, deciding to stay on the front foot.
“I don’t want you out of here. We’ve got to go talk to Korlakian’s neighbours, and his place is over on—”
“Yes you do. You were looking for a reason to speak to Jacobs someplace else and now you’re acting like Korlakian’s neighbours are about to ship out for good.”
“As you just reminded me, we’re up against a clock here. So unless your lens got a location fix on Freitas and Dade, then I don’t think there’s anybody else around here that we ought to be talking to.”
It sounds like a clincher for shipping out again, which is when the aromas elicit a hormone response that helps Alice dig her heels in. It’s like barbecue: frying meats and spices. The memory of her visit to NutriGen and what the “meat” might truly consist of does little to alleviate the effect. In the best tradition of peasant cuisine turning scant resources into the tastiest of dishes, she’s been told that the bars and diners on W1 have been perfecting their fare for decades. She was sceptical about this until her nose caught the first whiff.
“I’m hungry,” she says. “This is the first time I’ve had the chance to visit Mullane and I’ve heard the food’s great here. Or at least affordable. I’m on government wages, remember. Not supplemented by, you know, a second income,” she adds, leaving it hanging.
Nikki nails her with a penetrating stare, like she’s trying to look inside and see how much “Jessica” truly knows.
Her expression relaxes but doesn’t soften. It goes from intense scrutiny to a smile Alice finds just the wrong side of cruel.
“Know what? Fuck it. I could use a bite and a drink myself.”
Nikki leads Alice back along Mullane, making her way purposefully towards a place called Sin Garden. The music sounds like an assault from the second the doors open, thumping around a labyrinthine interior that seems designed to maximise the number of dark corners. Alice catches a glimpse of a dance floor somewhere beyond the maze of booths and tables, waiting staff slaloming a sweaty throng. She is instantly certain the place is in violation of its capacity restrictions, and the ambient temperature is noticeably in excess of recommended norms, with implications for both comfort and hygiene.
The smell of food is strong enough to indicate inadequate ventilation systems in the kitchen and very probably in the customer areas too. However, the principal effect of this is to precipitate a rumbling sensation in her gut, one that feels all the more pronounced as she takes note of the long queue before the hostess station. There has to be thirty people waiting for a table in the cramped and busy restaurant section.
Nikki waves towards the main bar and a man emerges from behind the gantry, bounding towards them with exaggerated geniality. He is thin but wiry, light on his feet but something dynamic in his gait. To Alice’s eyes, he could equally have been a dancer or a boxer before he ended up here, where she reckons he could probably make use of either talent. His hair is close-cropped and silver-grey, a scar down his right cheek from the temple to the jawline.
“Nikki Fixx,” he hails, holding up a hand for her to slap.
“Lo-Jack,” Nikki responds.
They are friendly but not warm, familiar but not close.
“So what kinda trouble do you ladies feel like getting into this evening?” he asks.
“Allow me to introduce Jessica Cho of the …” she begins, then lets it tail off. “Know what? Fuck it. Lo-Jack, this is Jessica. She’s my guest. I’m showing her around town, and she’s hungry.”
Lo-Jack glances momentarily into the restaurant section and gestures two waitresses towards a table whose occupants are in the process of leaving.
“No problem. Step right this way.”
He leads them past the line towards the now free table, which is already in the process of being reset. There are loud sighs and angry exclamations from people in the queue. Alice feels her cheeks burning, but Nikki doesn’t even give the impression of having heard.
One of the waitresses hands each of them a menu. Nikki gives it straight back without looking at the card or the woman proffering it, addressing the words “the usual” to Lo-Jack in a barely audible grunt.
Lo-Jack responds with a dismissive phony salute.
“I’ll just be a mo,” Nikki tells Alice. “Gotta go to the bathroom. You guys get her whatever she wants to eat and make sure she gets a mojito.”
Alice has glimpsed enough of the menu to see this cited at the top of the drinks list as the house specialty. Apart from a selection of rare malts, it is the most expensive item there, costing more than twice the priciest meal.
Lo-Jack twigs her reaction.
“Don’t sweat the prices, honey. If you’re with Nikki, it’s all on the house. Now what can I get you?”
The food reaches the table long before Nikki returns. The waitress also places down a mojito in front of Alice despite her having said she didn’t want it.
Alice sits for a few minutes staring at both meals, mindful of how she was brought up not to eat until everyone has been served, but eventually the smell, her appetite and her suspicion that Nikki is on more than a bathroom break prompts her to tuck in. She wolfs down several eager mouthfuls of what is, as Nikki described, a decent approximation of a burger. She’s certainly had worse on Earth, though she has to bear in mind that they do say hunger is the best sauce.
Meantime Nikki’s burrito lies there going cold. Alice wonders what other business she might be conducting right now, and whether it is the real reason she changed her mind in suddenly deciding to come here. Helen Petitjean had left little doubt why her nickname is Nikki Fixx, and her unsubtle efforts to forewarn everyone they had spoken to today alluded unmistakably to whatever it was she didn’t want them talking about.
Yet suddenly she had opted to bring Alice here, where she had dispensed with the warning and was flagrantly accepting gratuities from the management. What was that about? Did she think that “Jessica” accepting a free meal and a mojito was going to compromise her enough to provide some kind of leverage? If so she was very much mistaken. Alice intends to pick up the tab, laying down a marker to Nikki and to Lo-Jack.
Nikki saunters back at last, conspicuously unhurried, swaggering her way past the people in the line like she’s basking in their resentment. It’s reprehensible, and yet there is a secret part of Alice that is thrilled to witness it. She finds herself wishing she could have just a little of Nikki’s essence running through her. Alice expends so much energy worrying about staying in line, following protocols and avoiding giving offence. Wouldn’t it be cool to care just a little less? To be able to upset a bunch of strangers and not force yourself to do some kind of penance for it later?
Nikki slides into her seat and grabs the burrito with one hand, tearing at it messily with her teeth. Rice and sauce spill from her lips, trickling down her face and onto the table. She wipes her mouth with her sleeve and washes down the food with a gulp of an amber liquid Alice has not been able to identify. It smells like it could be whisky, but the volume is too large for it to be a spirit, surely. Surely.
“That hit the spot?” Nikki asks, as Alice gulps down the last of her burger. “You feeling better? Less cranky maybe?”
“Better, yes.”
“You ain’t touched your mojito. Get it down you,” she says, through a mouthful of food, more of which tumbles down her chin. “Best mojitos in Seedee, this place.”
Alice makes a play of nudging the mojito away from herself, towards the centre of the table. She says nothing but looks Nikki in the eye.
“What? You’re gonna tell me you don’t drink? Yeah, that’s the kinda joie de vivre that should see you fit right in at FNG.”
“Why did you bring me here?” Alice asks.
“You said you were hungry.”
“No, I mean why did you bring me here specifically? Why are you showing me all this? The bar has a quite vast variety of what I assume to be contraband alcohol openly on display, being merely the largest of about a dozen code violations I could list within thirty seconds of walking in the door. Code violations for which the proprietor has no expectation of being cited, for reasons directly related to the fact that he has no expectation of you paying for anything that is on this table.”
“I like to think of it as community spirit,” Nikki replies, washing down another bite of burrito with what, on balance, Alice decides is indeed probably Scotch.
“It looks a lot like bribery and corruption to me. So why would you show this to an official FNG observer?”
“I told you, I believe in full disclosure. I’m trying to help you understand the context against which this investigation is going to be conducted, which is a lot more grey and grimy and a lot less morally binary than you’re used to.”
“How would you know what I am used to?”
“I know how the FNG views things. They’re all hung up on the ideals of this society we’re building, and by that I mean the society that will be on the Arca, surviving in space for generations. Except they forget that we already got a society here, trying to survive in space. It ain’t as slick and pretty as the academics and politicians would like it. But it ain’t as ugly as they believe it is either. Point being, it is what it is, and we all do what we have to so we can all get along. Ain’t no need to go getting our panties in a bunch over smuggled booze or whatever else gets you through the night.”
“And what about the very people who are supposed to uphold the law and enforce the rules taking bribes and kickbacks? Is their corruption necessary for your society to get along?”
Nikki seems amused at Alice’s indignation.
“You’re making it sound a lot grander than it really is,” she says, shaking her head. She wipes some sauce from her plate with her finger, holding it up so that it glistens for a moment before she pops it into her mouth.
“The black economy is the lubricant that keeps the whole engine running smoothly up here. That’s the thing I need you to get your head around.”
It strikes Alice that all of this is bordering on a confession. She isn’t making specific actionable admissions, but it would be enough to put a spoke in her wheels by getting her suspended pending an investigation. However, Alice is not sure how much of what is being said will prove audible against the sound of the music. Which would be another reason Nikki brought her here.
“You’re kidding yourself if you think you can stay squeaky clean on Seedee and still hope to get anything done, so why don’t you drink your mojito. Make that your symbolic acceptance that you’re gonna get your hands dirty. You won’t get in trouble,” she adds mockingly.
Alice pauses then reaches for the glass, but only so that she can push it a few inches further away.
“I know I’m new here, but I’m not ready to accept your jaded model of CdC after two hours on Mullane. I don’t see the point of being a police officer if you have no respect for the law and just some self-serving arbitrary notion of right and wrong.”
Nikki pauses mid sip of her whisky. The amused look is gone, something altogether more serious in her eyes.
“That’s exactly what I’m trying to tell you here: something you won’t have learned at your Ivy League school or at any FNG induction bullshit. When you’re a cop, right and wrong ain’t about hard and fast rules, and sometimes it ain’t even about laws either. Forget the brochure version of CdC because you won’t find any answers in there. If we want to make headway in this investigation, we’re gonna have to deal with people and move in places that represent the harsher realities of life here. That means you gotta be prepared to turn a blind eye to lesser crimes.”
“And who decides which are the lesser crimes, Detective Freeman?”
“In my experience, bootlegging and payola are less of a threat to society than flaying a human being and turning the body into a real-life exploded anatomy diagram.”
“And in my experience, laws aren’t worth anything to a society unless the people enforcing them respect what they mean.”
From Nikki’s sour look and her silence, Alice knows she laid a glove on her with that.
Freeman is only on the ropes for a moment, though. Her crooked smile returns and she directs her gaze towards the contentious mojito.
“Can’t believe you’re gonna to let that go to waste.”
Alice interprets it as a concession of defeat, though if so it is a pitiably small victory.
As Nikki reaches across to grasp the glass, a man dressed in overalls appears at the edge of their table, red-faced and breathless.
“Nikki,” he gasps, causing her to turn.
She looks at him, calm and curious. She gives no indication whether she recognises him, but clearly he knows who she is.
Alice didn’t see where he arrived from. This would be difficult to discern, given the confusing layout, but she’s pretty sure he can’t have come from outside, or she’d have noticed his approach. He looks like he’s been running, which makes her wonder how far this place goes on for. Maybe he has come from the dance floor, but he doesn’t look dressed for it.
He leans over, cupping a hand to Nikki’s ear to make himself heard over the music. Alice doesn’t catch a word of it, but she can tell from his expression that it is as serious as it is urgent.
Nikki looks up at him, suddenly alert.
“Downstairs?” she says. “Right now?”
He nods gravely.
“Shit.”
She gets up from the table, the man already striding ahead to lead her.
Nikki turns to Alice.
“You stay here, understand? Don’t move. Let me handle this.”
Alice watches her hurry out of the restaurant area. She deliberates for precisely as long as it takes to realise that if she doesn’t follow immediately, she will lose Nikki in the labyrinth, then gets to her feet and starts running.
Nikki disappears from view as soon as Alice rounds the first corner, but she remains traceable from the sight of people moving sharply to let her through. Alice has to give her this much: for all her faults, when somebody needed her urgently, she dropped everything and went flat-out to assist.
Alice hurries along in her wake, racing to pass the people Nikki just scattered before they merge back into her path again. Veering right beyond the edge of the dance floor, she turns into a short corridor just in time to see a bouncer step aside, holding open the door he is guarding in order to let Nikki pass through without breaking stride.
Alice is extended no such courtesy. He lets the door swing shut and steps in front of it, blocking her path.
“I’m with her,” she calls out over the ubiquitous thump of the music. “Sergeant Freeman.”
The bouncer looks sceptical, saying nothing, not flinching in his stance.
Alice gestures a command so that her ID—or rather, Jessica’s ID—flashes up in his lens.
“I’m on FNG business. Official observer. Let me through.”
The bouncer steps aside with a reluctant expression, muttering “It’s your funeral,” as he holds open the door.
She heard Nikki say “Downstairs” but it’s still a surprise to see a staircase descending ahead of her. In her perception of CdC, everything is built upwards from the curving surface of the wheels’ interiors, with nothing beneath except for the utilities infrastructure: vents, ducts and crawlspaces. Clearly, she’s going to have to revise that quickly.
Alice almost trips in her haste, shooting her hands out against the encroaching walls to steady herself. They are rough, grazing her palms on a crude plaster skim indicating that it is an ad-hoc amendment to the structure, rather than part of the original design. Hitting the bottom, she finds herself in a dimly lit passageway, several doors on either side. Neither Nikki nor the man who came to fetch her are anywhere to be seen.
She can still feel the thump of the beat from upstairs disturbing the very air. The music itself is comparatively muted and indistinct, making the space seem all the more isolated and claustrophobic.
She hears a sharp crack, the unmistakable sound of an impact on human flesh from behind the door to her right. It is followed by a gasp of pain, then a muffled moan.
Alice tries the door but the handle turns uselessly. It is maglocked, the interface showing up on her lens as inaccessible. She doesn’t have the clearance level or the local override code.
She hears more noises from the other side of the passage: a strained grunt of effort, a spluttering cry of agony. Her lens indicates that this interface is active but not locked.
She turns the handle cautiously. Music hits her first, different from upstairs, before she opens the door wide enough to reveal something she’s going to have a hard time unseeing.
The room is done out like something from an eighteenth-century French chateau; or at least the set from a cheap sim trying to evoke the period. There are couches and chaises longues, as well as some kind of swing contraption suspended from the low ceiling. There are ten, maybe a dozen people in there: she can’t be sure. It’s difficult to tell given their interlocking positions. There are heads here, bottoms there, a churning blur of writhing nakedness.
Her intrusion is largely ignored, but for one guy looking up and saying: “Hey, you wanna jump in?”
A galaxy of no, she thinks, closing the door again, wishing she could thus undo opening it.
Belatedly it hits her, the name of the place: Sin Garden. As well as a bar, it’s some kind of sex club—literally an underground sex club.
She looks back towards the stairs and then to the other doors on either side of the passage, wincing to think what might be behind them, and how bad it must be if Nikki had to come running. Then she looks closer into the gloom and observes that where she thought there was a dead end, the corridor actually continues after a ninety-degree turn.
The turn reveals itself to be an s-bend, leading to a longer straight, this time without rooms leading off it. The walls are solid, lined with ducts and conduits, thick lines of cable and piping. She realises that though she has not passed through a door per se, she is no longer within the Sin Garden premises, but in a passageway somewhere beneath Mullane.
The music is all but gone, only a hint of the beat detectable. She can still make out a hubbub of voices and wonders why that would be carrying where the music did not.
She starts as she senses movement around her, her reflexes responding as though she is being snuck up on or ambushed. There is nothing to be seen, only a rumbling vibration from the floor indicating that something just went shuttling past beneath her. A few paces further on, she sees a warning sign on the wall, above an access panel inset into the floor. It features a stick-figure image of a body falling away from a ladder.
DANGER OF DEATH:
MAINTENANCE SHAFT DESCENDS TEN METRES.
HATCH WILL NOT OPEN UNLESS HARNESS
CONNECTION IS DETECTED AT TETHER POINT.
There is a steel loop anchored to the floor next to the panel, a run-stop pulley system monitored by a sensor. The sight of it makes her queasy, as does anything that reminds her that for all it looks like a thriving city, CdC is still clinging permanently to the edge of oblivion. Ten metres, the sign says. She wonders what is beneath the bottom of the shaft: how thick and robust is the final barrier between life and airless freezing death. She wonders also what just rumbled beneath her feet, because that didn’t come from ten metres below.
She is sure the hubbub is getting louder. Maybe she is underneath the dance floor, or maybe she is nearing a route back up.
As she approaches another bend, the sound gets louder still. She turns the corner into a longer stretch, still flanked by pipes and cabling, but at the end, about fifty metres away, is an open doorway. Through it she can see that the space widens out into a concourse.
She is disorientated by the layout but she is pretty sure this is a second thoroughfare vertically parallel with Mullane. It is low-ceilinged and not as broad, but there are hordes of people traversing it, almost as many as she saw on the street above.
Jeez, she wonders, not everybody’s down here having sex, are they?
Then she catches a glimpse. Like upstairs, again it’s the sight of people getting out of the way that she is able to track, though this time it’s more sudden, more violent. People scatter, briefly clearing the view from the doorway to Nikki, who is wrestling someone to the ground.
Alice sees a woman rush to intervene, crouching down and attempting to haul Nikki off whoever she is trying to restrain.
“Hey!” Alice calls out, breaking into a sprint.
The woman looks up to see where the cry came from, then turns her head to look down the passage. She climbs to her feet as Alice reaches the last few metres, balling her fists and readying herself in a stance.
Alice steels herself and accelerates, building up momentum for the moment of impact. Then a door swings shut at the end of the passage, and a fraction of a second later the floor disappears from beneath her feet, swinging away from her in two separating halves.
Alice tumbles into blackness, hitting cold metal a few feet below with a flailing thump, before something solid slides into place above her and seals with a hiss.
She rolls on to her back and hammers at the panel that has just closed above her head. It makes a loud and tinny bang, like she’s inside a drum. It’s not heavy but it is metal, so she isn’t going to be able to punch through it or even buckle it out of its frame. She tests the sides, thumping them with the edges of her balled fists. They are less giving, more substantial. What is above is a lid. This is a crate. She’s trying not to panic, but she can’t help thinking about that hiss, the implications for whether this box she’s just become trapped in is airtight.
There is a shudder, the smallest sense of vertical movement, as though the crate has been raised up and is no longer resting on the floor of the tunnel. At the same time, she feels all her hair stand on end, a response to something electrical, magnetic. The box begins to move, accelerating along the axis she is lying. She puts her hands to the sides, anchoring herself so that she isn’t bashed around. She recalls a moment from childhood: a spider climbing into an open matchbox, a boy sliding it closed and shaking it. His gleeful hand sliding it open again, shaking out the broken pieces.
Alice feels a pull towards the bottom as the crate rapidly decelerates. Then it shunts sideways, smoothly but swiftly, like it’s being moved to a new channel, and a moment later it is accelerating again.
She smells something, sweet but sickly. Cloying.
Alice feels woozy. She knows seasickness is worst when you can’t see the horizon, your eyes unable to track the movement your body is feeling. Her eyes can see nothing at all, but she doesn’t think that’s the source of the weakness creeping over her.
She feels her arms become limp, her eyes begin to close.