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.