Aethernet Magazine #10 by Ed. Barbara Ballantyne

Author:Ed. Barbara Ballantyne
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub

43: Damon Masterson

Damon followed Ophelia into the Maze. He felt apprehensive. She’d found him in the Buziness district and told him to come along, and he’d done so because that’s what an Open Source detective did, but even so, he wasn’t quite sure what was going on. In the old days, detectives had been invited on cases by beautiful blonde women. Damon had been propositioned by a rather attractive tabby cat. She ran on ahead of him, tail in the air.

“How do I know I can trust you?” asked Damon.

“You don’t.”

“You know what? I used to think that I could do it on my own. All I had to do was find out the truth and report it and that would be it.”

They were descending staircase 2 into the skin of the Rock. For the Maze, the area was unusually deserted.

“Well, that is true, isn’t it?” Ophelia was running on ahead. “Come on, this way!” She plunged down a dim stone corridor, heading downwards all the time. Damon hurried to keep up.

“You were saying about the truth,” said Ophelia. “How all you thought that all you’d have to do was report it… "

“And it’s not like that! Anything but! Do you realise just how much money it costs just to live on the Rock? Never mind all the expenses I rack up just doing my job. I’ve got so many sponsors, so many people trying to get me to do what they want… "

“Ignore them,” said Ophelia.

“It’s not that easy! But you wouldn’t understand that.”

“I understand perfectly. Now, we need to be quiet along here… "

“Why? There’s no-one around… "

“Shh!”

They looked both ways. Ophelia’s whiskers prickled as she sniffed the air. The corridor was empty, the apartments here were unoccupied, and now Damon realised where they were…

“Okay,” said Ophelia. “In we go.”

He followed her into the disused space. Most of it was a typical apartment, there were lots of doors hiding cupboards, a bed, the disposal unit. But the rear wall was missing. A bare stone passageway curved ever downwards…

“You won’t find many people who want to talk about this part of the Maze,” said Ophelia, walking on again. “And that’s to our advantage. The tunnellers delved too deep and cut through to space. Thirty five people were blown out of the gap, lost in outer space, killed by explosive decompression. That’s all out in the open, of course, not that anyone’s interested. But you can’t report anything about coming here.”

“I know. We agreed.”

This was exactly what Damon was trying to express. He may have given the impression of being the rebel, the man who challenged authority, the man who followed his own rules, but in reality everything he did was surrounded by compromise.

Ophelia spoke as she walked. “Engineering sealed the skin, then they placed that false apartment at the mouth of the corridor. They rejigged the topology of the corridors, rewrote the inside of the Maze. It was the only space that no one claimed, so we took it

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