Alice needs to call this in, which means a return to the privacy of her room at the Armstrong Hotel. It isn’t a conversation she can be having over sub-vocal, standing where someone might overhear. She travels by static, compiling further details of her report during the journey back to Garneau, now that she has full functionality of her lens.
She notices a pile of comm requests and other messages stacking up. She scans the list briefly, in case there’s anything that can’t wait. One is from someone at the FNG’s tech department concerning her lens outage. Another is from Helen Petitjean, flagged Urgent. From the impression Alice gleaned during their time together, she is willing to bet it’s anything but. However, she owes Helen on a number of counts, so she decides to respond to the request anyway.
“Ms. Petitjean. I just got your message. I’ve been dealing with a situation. Is everything okay?”
Helen does not reply immediately, and when she does, her tone is breathily meek.
“Alice, my dear. Thank you for getting back to me. I apologise if I gave the impression it was something dramatic. I realise in retrospect, with your current jurisdiction taking in law enforcement, that our definitions of what constitutes ‘urgent’ may diverge.”
Alice finds her cadences pleasing, a hint of the old-fashioned peculiarly reassuring in her present environment.
“Don’t mention it. Is there something I can help you with?”
“Well, it’s simply that I woke up to this horrible, horrible news and felt it was imperative that I speak with you. I just feel so awful for that poor woman. It’s like we are all complicit because we didn’t act in time.”
“Gillian Selby,” Alice says, because there is nothing else she can offer. She speaks quietly, conscious that there are other people in the carriage.
“Was that the name of the ahm, the ahm … the victim?”
“She was a fabrication worker.”
Alice isn’t sure whether Helen was skirting around the word prostitute or the word victim, but some impulse doesn’t want Selby defined as either.
“Of course,” Helen replies, seeming to understand the same point. “But I was actually talking about the sergeant.”
“Nikki Freeman?” Alice needs to confirm.
“Of course. I was concerned about all that she has become, and I warned you she was dangerous, but I never would have believed she could be capable of something like this.”
You don’t know the half of it, she thinks, picturing the slaughterhouse she left behind at Habitek.
“I must confess that sympathy for Nikki Freeman is not what I was expecting to hear from anybody right now,” Alice says.
Least of all you, she does not need to add.
“And therein lies a tragedy in itself. Because one cannot begin to imagine the state of torment someone’s life must reach before they are driven to such despair. And it is all the worse because I know she wasn’t always like this. I knew her when she first arrived here. We were acquaintances, if not precisely what you would call friends. We’ve both been here a long time.”
“Do you know why she came?”
“Not specifically. To escape something, that’s all I know. Some people come to CdC because of what they are trying to leave behind and some people come because they see opportunity, but in both cases we’re trying to build a new future. Nobody comes without hope, no matter what has happened to them in the past. But that’s why we must nurture it, and why corruption is such an insidious enemy. This far from the Earth’s molten core, your moral compass is the only one that guides you. But if it gets damaged, you can so easily become lost up here in the darkness. It becomes a process of tiny increments, each little compromise taking you one step further off the path than the last.
“Something hurt that woman. That’s why she’s here. Something damaged her, and this place should have repaired it, but instead she got worse and worse. That’s why what’s happened should be a time for a new beginning. With you in control, we have the chance to clean up the Seguridad, to change the culture of CdC, and finally make it the launchpad where we truly set our sights upon a better vision of mankind.”
Alice glances across at two people sitting opposite on the static car. She has only been here a matter of days, but she already finds it difficult to look at anyone without wondering what brought them to this place, what their story might be.
“Being able to work here isn’t merely a privilege,” Helen goes on, a warm passion rising in her voice. “It should be a vocation, a calling. Once you finish your shift, your thoughts should be about how best you can rest and prepare to make your next contribution. Not about physical gratification. You should be improving yourself in the interim, every way you can. Reading, learning, practising. Professor Gonçalves has given people an unprecedented shortcut in learning new skills, new abilities and knowledge, so they should be spending the time this shortcut saved them by building on that. Strikes me some of us are making sacrifices and giving so much of ourselves so that mankind can reach for the stars, while others are still just reaching for a bottle or reaching into their shorts.
“If we don’t cure ourselves of these indulgent instincts, if we don’t mature as a species, how do we think those brave pioneers are going to survive for generations on the Arca? These are the problems we need to solve before we can even think about launching that thing. Oh, sure there are technical challenges to be met too, but I believe we’ll solve those ones a whole lot faster once people start learning to behave themselves.”