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 overhead 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.
She’s not looking to move in, rent a pod—she just needs someplace to hide while she works out her next move. Problem is, she has no next move. She’s got nobody left to turn to, and not just because Yoram has sold her out. She realises there’s nobody she would turn to: nobody she has any reason to trust or who would do her a solid now that she has nothing to offer in return. She doesn’t have friends, only people who are afraid of her or who have been paying for her services.
She remembers what Alice said at Klaws, comments that hurt so bad because they found their mark. She’s nobody’s friend, nobody’s enemy and not even anybody’s problem: just their least-worst solution. Now there’s nobody who could be her solution, least-worst or any other kind.
She recalls her last exchange with Candace, who was trying to be a friend, or at least a confidante, until Nikki threw it back in her face.
Even a cold-hearted bitch needs to feel somebody likes her now and again.
They don’t like you, Nikki. It just seems that way because they don’t hate you as much as you do.
Well, she’s pretty sure everybody hates her as much as she does now, especially if the word is out regarding Giselle.