The part of Nikki that’s resigned to this wants to close her eyes, but the part that’s pissed at never getting another shot of Speyside wants to look this fucker in the face. She lifts her head and stares at him in defiance
He suddenly flinches and puts a hand to the back of his neck.
“What the fuck?”
When he pulls it away, there are several tiny bloodspots on his palm, a pattern of dots in a cluster.
The knifeman and his buddy turn around to look in the direction of possible fire, at which point a second cluster blooms on the other merc’s cheek.
He looks up towards the viewing gallery, both of them drawing flechette pistols and aiming them instinctively. Nikki watches a slight, silhouetted figure duck swiftly as a hail of plastic darts impacts uselessly against the glass. The figure isn’t going anywhere either, just sitting tight and observing. Which would indicate that the weapon Nikki can see is one of the Seguridad’s goodnight guns.
“Who the hell is that?” asks the knifeman.
“Too far to ID. Dart just grazed me anyway. Give me some cover while I go deal.”
“You got it.”
“No,” Nikki says. “You boys best take a seat.”
“What?” he asks, irritated but curious.
“So you don’t injure yourselves when you—”
He collapses like a felled tree, no hands reaching to cushion the fall. Consequently his face slams against the deck, a tooth clattering out across the metal, but by that point he is oblivious of pain and injury.
His buddy goes down a little easier, like a puppet with his strings cut.
Riot control measures, Seedee style: suppression rifles deliver a high-velocity blast of rapidly-acting tranquilliser pellets. Once you’ve been tagged, you’ve got a matter of seconds to make yourself comfortable, then …
“Goodnight,” Nikki says.
From below comes the rumbling of the elevator bringing the shuttle up the shaft. It was supposed to be her hearse. She was bound for the cargo hold wrapped in this black plastic sheet. Less than a minute has passed since that merc drew his knife, but she’s already supposed to be dead right now.
Nikki looks up again and watches her saviour climb over the glass barrier. She drapes down, landing on the floor with practised gymnastic elegance. Nikki immediately thinks of the assassin at Habitek, but no, it’s even weirder than that.
Walking towards her with a suppression rifle slung across her back is G2S herself: Alice fucking Blake.
Nikki’s handcuffs fall open and tumble to the ground.
“We need to get this pair into the passenger cabin,” Alice says, bending down and trying to drag one of the mercs towards the platform where the shuttle is beginning to emerge.
Nikki watches, still paralysed by disbelief.
Alice stops mid-drag and glares at her.
“You going to give me a hand here or not?”
“I dunno. I’m getting mixed signals and I want to consider my next step. I mean, I recall telling you that your attitude to law and morality was kinda rigid, and I’m getting the impression that your position is a little more ambivalent than last time we spoke—which I applaud, don’t get me wrong. But you wanna tell me just what the fuck is going on?”
“I know you didn’t kill Omega.”
The shuttle’s co-pilot is emerging from his craft, the pilot still visible in his seat up in the cockpit. He looks apprehensively towards the two unconscious figures lying on the deck, the shorter of whom is now having his clothes removed by Alice. Then he turns his gaze towards Nikki, whom he assumes to be in charge as she is the older of the two.
“We have orders to pick up a Seguridad detail,” he says, sounding uncertain. “Prisoner transfer to Heinlein?”
“Prisoners plural,” Alice tells him, standing up. She speaks with the confidence of somebody used to being obeyed.
Nikki figures the co-pilot’s lens is now telling him who is really in charge, and to precisely what extent: no less than the Principal of the SOE. He doesn’t ask any questions.
He assists in dragging the two mercs to the passenger cabin, where they are strapped into the side-facing seats. Alice produces a jizz cannon and hits each of the assholes with a cum-shot, binding them around the torso and gluing them to the wall. She then rips out their wrist discs. These guys won’t be sending any SOS messages when they wake up: not until they reach Heinlein, leastways.
The co-pilot looks at her in shock. Nikki isn’t sure if he’s appalled by her repeatedly shooting unconscious men or if he’s already thinking about the effort it’s going to take to remove all that resin from the inside of his nice ship.
“I want you to take them to Heinlein and await instructions. Do not open the passenger cabin. These individuals are dangerous. You will be met at the other end by people who can handle these guys. Do you understand?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Then what are you waiting for? Get to it.”
They watch the shuttle begin to descend on its platform.
“There isn’t the equipment at Heinlein to free those assholes,” Nikki says. “They’ll need to be brought back to Seedee before they can be completely cut from the resin. That means the pair of them are out of play for at least ten hours, but once the alarm is raised there will be others looking for me.”
“Flight time to Heinlein is five hours, so that’s our window,” Alice replies.
“To do what?”
“Find the puppet master.”
“You mean whoever’s behind this shit? Because I don’t have a list of suspects. How about you?”
“Nothing concrete, just the odd suspicious coincidence. What can you tell me about Helen Petitjean?”
“That bloodless old husk? She’s who you got your eye on?”
“Just a thread that might be worth pulling. I found out she’s got a high-level connection in the FNG, and as a result of current events, things are suddenly going very well for both of them.”
“Petitjean is a true believer,” Nikki tells her. “In a bygone age she’d have been a religious fundamentalist. Fond of fancy talk about the potential of humankind but not exactly overflowing with human kindness. She reminds me of every school teacher I ever hated, though I’m guessing hating a teacher ain’t a concept you can get your head around.”
“Well, you don’t need to like somebody to learn from them,” Alice replies, though there is a hint of a smile in there.
Nikki can’t help but return it.
“Come on,” Alice urges. “Clock’s ticking. Get these clothes on.”
“These clothes that you just took off that merc? Why?”
Alice hands her a new lens rig.
“Because you’re Megan Driscoll, veteran FNG data analyst on secondment to the SOE. The facial-recognition alert status on Nikki Freeman was deactivated once you were placed in custody, and now as far as Seguridad is aware, Nikki Fixx is officially off CdC and on route to Heinlein.”
Nikki accepts the rig gratefully, popping the lenses, wrist unit and sub-vocal into place. Then she slips out of her clothes and into the fatigues. They are a little roomy but a passable fit.
“Not sure this is me.”
“That’s the idea.”
Nikki pulls her hair back into a ponytail, fixing it with a tie-band she found on the floor. There’s always dozens of them in freight areas.
“I look uptight enough?”
Alice ignores this.
“So, you wanna tell me what’s behind you going rogue all of a sudden? How come you know I didn’t kill anybody?”
“I didn’t say anybody. But I know for sure you didn’t kill Omega.”
“How?”
“Because I did.”
Nikki gapes. This shit just keeps making less sense.
“I’m sending you a grab. This was taken by Korlakian.”
Nikki runs the file. Everything lurches and swirls. She’s looking out through the eyes of a guy getting his ass handed to him, and with a growing revulsion it dawns on her that if it ends the way she anticipates, this could be a literal description.
She is bracing herself for horror, so she isn’t ready for shock.
“Fuck me.”
Nikki pauses the playback. She doesn’t need to see what happens next.
“You did this,” she says. “All along, it was you. So why are you fessing up now? And what else ain’t you telling me?”
“Because I only found out it was me when I saw the grab. I have no memory of this.”
Nikki races through possibilities. Are they talking about mind-control shit here? People on Seedee have always been paranoid about the concept of mesh malware, but nobody ever came forward to claim a malfunction, never mind a virus. Besides, Alice doesn’t even have a mesh. G2S only just got here.
She looks to the girl, a dozen questions on her lips, but Alice is the one who gets in first.
“I need to know, Nikki: why did you talk about me not being born from drinking and sex? What do you know?”
Nikki has no notion of how this is relevant or where it might be going.
“What do I know? About what? I meant you probably weren’t conceived in some late-night drunken fuck like the rest of us. It was a dig at your straight-ass FNG aristo parents. I was forgetting you were adopted. What’s that to do with—”
“Why did you bring up the idea of someone being an android without knowing it?”
“I was just shooting the shit, throwing out stuff that sometimes freaks new arrivals.”
Then Nikki belatedly realises what Alice is saying.
“Wait. You’re telling me you think you’re an android? That’s your explanation for this?”
“Yes. Because I have no recollection of doing it, but it’s me right there in the grab. I realised I have no independent verification of anything I did before I came to CdC. And since I arrived at Heinlein, every time I wake up from sleep, it’s like my memory is reassembling itself.”
“I keep waking up with no recollection of what preceded going to sleep, but there’s a simple explanation. It’s called alcohol.”
“You said there are rumours that super-advanced AI has been invented on CdC but its existence kept secret.”
“Yeah, but I never believed them.”
“How about now?” Alice asks. “Yesterday I woke up feeling physically exhausted and then found out about the Habitek massacre.”
And suddenly something Nikki has been trying to run away from has her cornered. The assassin who killed Julio and his men: jarringly fleet, impossibly nimble. A white streak, human tracer fire. Part bullet, part ballet.
“I saw the killer at Habitek. It was at a distance and I was looking through night vision, but yeah. It could have been you. I’m sure it was a woman: slight, sleek, fast, graceful.”
“That’s what I meant by finding the puppet master. Somebody is controlling me.”
Nikki is still fighting it. Her cop’s instinct is nagging her that something doesn’t fit, like the times she couldn’t place a suspect at the locus even though everything else appeared to match up.
She looks at the grab again, paused on Alice’s face as she stares back at Korlakian. It’s her all right, but with different hair. Gotta be a wig.
Shit.
Instead of dispelling what she can’t accept, she just made another piece fit. Nikki realises who Mrs. Pang was really talking about when they spoke in the alley.
That girl back at your apartment. Yeah, I saw her here before, except her hair was different.
Mrs. Pang meant Alice, not Giselle. She saw Alice going up the stairs with Nikki, and she had seen her earlier, heading to Nikki’s apartment with Giselle, but with different hair.
It was Alice who killed her.
But even as she thinks this, she sees where the theory doesn’t add up. For one, the face in the grab is not triggering any recognition. Like Amber down in the Catacombs, she appears to have no listed identity.
“You’ve got an alibi,” Nikki tells her.
“For what? Being asleep alone doesn’t count.”
“For Giselle. My neighbour Mrs. Pang said she saw you and Giselle heading for my apartment before she was killed.”
“I don’t know how they do things in the Seguridad, but that sounds like the opposite of an alibi.”
“No, it’s as solid as they come. Because while Giselle was being murdered, you were trussed up unconscious in Trick’s workshop. And what you didn’t notice is that your name doesn’t come up when you look at this woman. No name does: she registers as a blank. This blonde psycho bitch ain’t you.”