Nikki hears raised female voices, sounds of panic and distress. She doesn’t know if it’s a result of decades of conditioning or something more instinctive, but her immediate concerns are instantly suspended as she readies herself to respond.
She sees a woman hurtle out from between two rows of pods, bashing against a bulkhead and then running full-pelt in her direction. Her eyes are wild, a look of primal ferocity in her face.
Another woman emerges at her back, looking distraught and fearful.
“Stop her,” she calls. “Somebody stop her.”
Nikki grips the electro-pulse baton and takes a defensive stance as the crazed woman barrels towards her. She is about to strike when the other calls out again.
“Please. She’s going to hurt herself.”
Nikki deactivates the baton with her thumb and braces for impact. This is going to hurt. She lets the woman crash into her, absorbing some of her momentum so that she can shift her balance and bring her down. They tumble to the floor together, Nikki taking the brunt of the fall, then Nikki expertly rolls her so that she’s on top. The woman is not strong but she’s desperate, fighting for her life.
The second woman catches up with them and crouches down, putting a hand on the crazy one’s shoulder.
“Amber, it’s okay. Amber, you’re safe. It’s okay. Just let go. We’ve got you. We’ve got you. It’s okay.”
Her voice is soft and steady, though Nikki can hear the anxiety she’s masking.
Nikki feels the fight go out of Amber, if that is her name. According to her lens, she doesn’t have one. Stowaway, she thinks.
The other woman she knows, now that she can see her up-close. Her name is Zola Petriskaya, a Russian nurse who used to work at the infirmary. A few years back she made sexual assault and harassment allegations against an exec at OmniSant, the company that runs ERU. Then, what do you know, damning evidence suddenly emerged in support of a bullshit fraud allegation against her, and guess which one was expedited in the Seguridad’s list of investigation priorities? Zola was discredited, her contract cancelled and a jump seat was rapidly (and expensively) allocated to bounce her back planetside.
They railroaded her but she didn’t leave town. Now Zola’s the closest thing they have to a doctor down here: a regular patron saint of the Catacombs. She’s getting medical supplies from someplace, and she makes enough in unofficial work to get by in Ghost Town but not enough to escape. Nikki suspects she’s getting paid by somebody upstairs to provide certain services, same as somebody gets paid to sort the air and the water if anything goes wrong.
“Nikki Fixx,” she acknowledges. “Thanks for your help. This one’s extremely distressed.”
“So I see.”
“What brings you down here?”
And there’s another reason she came to Ghost Town. These are not merely Seedee’s materially dispossessed, they are its information-poor also. Zola doesn’t know Nikki is on the lam.
Like most people here, Zola’s lens has limited functionality (if it’s functioning at all, repairs and maintenance being an expensive business). Once you abscond, your lens still retains its localised primary data, but is cut off from network services, such as the centralised ID database, in the same way as Nikki was instantly cut off from Seguridad comms channels. Nikki is still able to access these other services because Trick hacked her rig years ago, allowing her to switch between multiple identities, and Hayley Ortega still has her basic privileges intact.
“Can you help me get her back to my nook?” Zola asks.
“Sure.”
They assist Amber onto unsteady feet, the fight and mania having gone out of her. She needs merely to be led rather than carried. They flank her either side, making sure she doesn’t bash herself against anything but also positioning themselves to prevent another flight attempt.
“They took my baby,” Amber says, sounding numb, tearful. “They took her. They took my baby.”
“Who did?” Nikki asks.
“They took my baby. They took my baby.”
“She never says,” Zola replies. “We don’t get much sense out of her. She’s catatonic half the time, incoherent the other half, and occasionally hysterical, like just then.”
“She ever say anything else about the baby?”
“Nothing that makes sense. I think this is something that happened before she came to Seedee. I’m guessing it’s why she came.”
“You say her name is Amber? I’m getting nothing on my lens. She’s reading completely blank. She could be a stowaway.”
“I’ve asked her what her name is but she says she doesn’t remember. She responds to Amber, but it’s like she knows you’re referring to her even though it’s not her real name. I don’t know, I could be wrong. Just a feeling.”
They reach Zola’s pod, or nook as the ghosts call them. Nikki helps Zola lay her down on a roll-up nano-foam mattress she must have salvaged from somewhere, maybe even her own apartment before she had to bail. Amber curls up into a foetal position, weeping meekly from blank eyes.
“Why Amber, then?”
“Amber is what the man who brought her here called her. He gave me some money and asked me to look after her. He didn’t say when he’d be back, but he hasn’t shown up yet and this was four days ago.”
“Who was he?”
“He wouldn’t tell me. Said it was best for me if I didn’t know. I found out, though. A man here called Jabra has a hacked lens. Jabra got a look at him. He told me his name was Leonard Slovitz.”
The name doesn’t mean anything to Nikki, but she can look it up. Of more immediate concern is finding out more about this Jabra guy so that she can stay out of his line of sight.
“I might speak to him later. Can you show me what he looks like?”
“I can take you to him, or maybe go fetch him so I don’t leave Amber alone.”
“No, no, just send me a pic if you got one.”
“Okay.”
An image appears in Nikki’s lens. Jabra looks Middle Eastern, older than Nikki, an unkempt bushy salt-and-pepper beard dominating his face. In other places she would see him coming a hundred yards out, but in the Catacombs a messy beard is the male dress code, grooming facilities being somewhat sub-optimal.
“What is your business down here?” Zola asks.
“Can’t talk about it. I’m kinda waiting for something, so I’m not in any rush. If you got things you need to attend to, I can sit here with Amber until you get back.”
Zola has the look of a stressed mother who just got an offer to look after the kids for an hour.
“You are sure?”
“Just don’t abandon me here for four days like Leonard.”
Nikki takes a seat down on the floor next to Amber, who is still breathing fast but seems more peaceful, or maybe just exhausted. It’s Nikki’s first chance to get a close look at her. She’s young for Seedee; at least for someone outside the more rarefied professions, where whizz-kids and prodigies proliferate. She looks like she could be mid-twenties, maybe even younger. Certainly not old enough to have made a big mistake she’s running away from.
Maybe running away was her big mistake.
Her eyes remain open, a disconnected waking state that seems a distressing mockery of sleep. She reaches out a hand and rests it on Nikki’s thigh. Nikki looks down and there is eye contact, a supplicant pleading look. It takes a moment to work out what she is pleading for. The answer is merely contact.
She places a hand on top of Amber’s, at which point something softens in her face and her eyes begin to close. A few minutes after that, she is asleep.
Nikki shifts her position, trying to get comfortable in the cramped nook. Amber moves too, Nikki concerned that she has woken her, but she is merely rolling over. Granted a view of the back of her head, Nikki notices that she has a scar from where a mesh has been fitted. This doesn’t fit with the stowaway theory. You can’t get the operation unless you’re legit, and yet she is showing up as having no identity.
Another possibility is that Amber has the credentials to deny identification, but that usually prompts a “not authorised” message in the lens of the beholder, just to rub it in. It would also beg the question of how someone with such credentials could end up abandoned to this place.
Nikki looks closer at Amber’s hands. There doesn’t appear to be a sensor on either wrist, suggesting she doesn’t have a lens. Who has a mesh but no lens?
Of course, a simpler explanation for Amber’s ID showing up blank is that something is wrong at Nikki’s end. It could be the first sign that her rig is corrupting, or that Hayley Ortega’s privileges are more limited than she’d like.
Ordinarily this would be her cue to visit Trick, but that is not an option now, and for multiple reasons. She wonders who these people were that abducted him. Was that bullshit from Alice? Covering up that she had actually called in some help while she was being held there, and had her own people take Trick in for questioning?
No, she realises, and not merely because Trick’s first task was to disable Alice’s lens, thus preventing her contacting anybody.
Nikki flashes back to their conversation in Klaws, concerning the woman who took Trick away.
She mentioned something named Project Sentinel. You heard of it?
The reason they had subsequently bailed in a big hurry was not, as Alice assumed, because they identified her as having major status with the FNG. It was because something connected her to the same “touch of death” Sol Freitas passed on to Nikki with his final breath.
This being the case, she doesn’t like the implications for her chances of seeing Trick alive again.
For now, Amber’s identity aside, Nikki’s lens appears to be functioning normally, so she runs some searches for Leonard Slovitz.
The good news is that there are no clearance-level restrictions on access to his basic data. The bad news is that he won’t be coming back for Amber any time soon. According to his public profile, Slovitz is a neuroscientist who works at the Neurosophy Foundation. He took a leave of absence to return to Earth for personal reasons. He left CdC on April 7, three days ago, shortly after Zola says he came here.
The date chimes with Nikki but she can’t remember why.
A neuroscientist drops off a basket case in the Catacombs and promptly blows town. Nikki thinks about the shooting incident in Central Plaza, wonders whether Yoram was wrong. Maybe the target was Gonçalves after all.
There are multiple contact details listed for him, accessible at Hayley Ortega’s level of clearance. It’s less than she could access if she was still logged in as a cop, but it’s a lead at least.
Nikki copies a message to all the listed contacts, asking Slovitz to get in touch as a matter of urgency. She adds that it is concerning “a code amber.” She isn’t holding her breath for a reply.
The news feeds are firing out updates in a ferment, horrified responses to the Gillian Selby murder. Won’t be long before somebody at Seguridad leaks what happened at Habitek, or they simply quit trying to contain it because they have someone to pin the whole thing on. Nikki can already imagine the reports once they connect her to the scene. “She went on a killing spree when she was cornered by concerned citizens trying to bring her in.” They can pin Omega on her too, say she went space-crazy, any bullshit they want to make up.
This is over for her. It’s so over. All she can do now is hole up here and wait for the inevitable. She closes her eyes and lets herself drift, content at least that on this occasion she is aware of where she is lying down to sleep.