The Beam: Season Three (18 page)

“It’s something you’ll want,” said Dominic. “But something that will be useless in…” He looked at Lewis.
 

“About an hour,” said Lewis.
 

“Is it a creeper?”
 

“You’ll know the minute you’re officially in charge of this crime scene, and I’m required to hand it over.”
 

The agent’s eyes narrowed. He was half-AI, but also half-human. Anger was there, just behind the logic.
 

“You can’t win this,” said the agent.
 

“I know I can’t. But I can delay it. For at least an hour.” Dominic shook the pouch containing the evidence that, in short order, would lose all its usefulness.

The agent’s jaw worked. The other Quark agent came up behind him, now curious. They could have been twins.
 

“What do you want?” the first agent asked.
 

“Tell me who those men are.”
 

“We don’t know that.”
 

“Bullshit!”
Dominic snapped, feeling power slide into his court. “You’re surprised we caught a creeper, but you’re not surprised there was one. We didn’t hear you come in and didn’t get a ping. The door was locked. So not only were you let in by building security; you knew exactly where you were going without DZPD telling you — something I can tell just by looking at my com channel. We haven’t ID’d them yet, and I’m sure you turned our sweeper crew away at the door, but the only way you’d be here, on this exact spot, without other intel, would be if you had word through The Beam. On Crossbrace, I’d have believed you’d be able to sniff your way here without an ID, but privacy is one of The Beam’s big selling points, isn’t it? Not inherently, but because the AI keeps its mouth shut. Except, perhaps, when other AI is doing the asking.”
 

Lewis looked over at Dominic. Lewis was his superior, but Dom was the one who, according to rumor, might be knocking on the door of a promotion. Lewis had always seemed baffled by that, but right now Dominic could see respect on his face. Apparently, Dom was DZPD’s secret weapon after all.
 

The agent seemed to war with something inside. His eyes clouded with the stir of nanobots, and Dominic could imagine invisible communication running between the agents, through The Beam.
 

Go ahead and tell him, or we’ll never get the creeper in time
, Dom imagined the second agent saying to the first.
 

“Off the record, subject retroactively to the purge I have already enacted and that will resume once authority over this case returns to Quark, Quark PD positively identified the presence of a creeper worm erasure in progress at this location.”
 

“How? What does it mean to you?”
 

“Creeper technology is traceless and results in perfect erasure and anonymization. The data edges on this particular operation are particularly fine and indicate the work of worm technology we haven’t seen before. But data-native agents parsing the sector saw the absence of data itself and crawled the surrounding code.”
 

“What does that mean?” Dominic asked.
 

The agent didn’t break eye contact. “That is confidential information.”
 

Dominic shrugged. He pocketed Lewis’s handheld and said to his partner, “You want to get a slice of pizza? This kind of bureaucratic spat takes forever to resolve.”
 

Dominic actually tried to push past the agent before the man’s big hand stopped him.
 

“Because you are organic — and especially because you are
wholly
organic, with no biological connectivity at all — you cannot appreciate the metadata of existence.”
 

Dominic looked at the agent with scorn. That was machine talk.
 

“I’m talking about what used to be called the Internet of Things,” the agent elaborated. “Everything in the physical world is replicated and updated several times each second by Crossbrace and Beam sensors combined with data fed into the network by users who see and touch things throughout their daily lives. The code shows the world differently. Once we saw the worm’s work, it was simple to reach into the data around it, through several local sensors and the remains of these men’s native add-ons.”
 

The agent tipped his head toward the two dead men on the floor. Then he looked again at the second agent and reluctantly went on.
 

“A reverse search allowed us to identify the victims,” he concluded.

Dominic hadn’t been expecting that. Apparently, neither had Lewis because he practically blurted, “They were erased! And they were privacy encrypted! We were right here, and we could never have identified them without — ”
 

The agent cut him off. “Different capabilities exist when you are able to look from the inside out rather than from the outside in.”
 

The second agent’s jaw became hard and firm. Apparently, clerics could get angry, just like people. He said, “You don’t even understand your world. To you, The Beam is a toy.”
 

“Who are they?” Dominic asked. Then, when the agents paused, Dominic tapped his pocket and tried again to push by.
 

“Oates, Marshall,” said the second agent, pointing at the dead man near the ramshackle couch. Then he pointed at the other. “Hawes, Colin.”
 

Dominic’s mind churned. He looked at Lewis then at the agents.
 

“The Plasteel baron? And the…” He couldn’t even get out Hawes’s claim to fame before the agent cut him off again.
 

“Yes.”
 

“Why are they here? In the ghetto?”
 

“We do not know.”
 

“Who killed them?”
 

“We do not know. But we have seen the nature of the damage. Both had protections in place that Quark does not have on file. Whatever was done, it was…advanced.”
 

Dominic looked at Lewis again. Then at the agents. The dead men on the floor: two of the richest, most powerful people to ever live, dead here below the line. They’d both been shoddily dressed. Their faces obscured. They’d both been armed, traces of various narcotics scattered about. Whoever had set up this little diorama to cover two extraordinarily high-profile crimes had done an excellent job. If not for Dominic’s prickling sense of unease and the Quark agents’ arrival and ensuing gambit, nobody would ever have known.
 

And, because Quark was about to take over and erase all records, nobody ever
would
know. Except for Dominic and his partner, who would know to keep their mouths shut unless they wanted a visit from Quark — or maybe a creeper — too.
 

The first agent held out his hand. Reluctantly, knowing how far he could push and where he’d need to stop, Dominic handed over the pouch containing the creeper.
 

“And your query,” said the agent, nodding at the handheld in Dominic’s pocket. “Release your challenge on Quark’s takeover of this case.”
 

Dominic pulled the handheld from his pocket and hovered his finger above its screen, ready to release the query. Then he looked up and met the agents’ churning gray eyes.
 

“One more question,” Dominic said.
 

“You cannot do anything with the information we’ve given or will give you,” said the second agent.

“It’s for me. Personal curiosity.”

“You are forbidden to mention any of what’s happened here,” said the first agent. “It is irrelevant.”
 

“Indulge me,” said Dominic.
 

Beside Dom, Lewis looked ready to head out. His tough veneer had cracked. They’d pushed too hard — not just against the rapidly rising power of Quark PD clerics, but against something bigger. Something that obeyed the first rule of conspiracy:
the less you know, the better
.
 

“Let’s go, Dom,” said Lewis. “Release the query.”
 

But Dominic ignored him. “This vacuum of data you mentioned. It erased these two’s minds and identifiers. But did it touch anything else? Is there any other specific information you know that went missing today?”

“Only coincidentally, and only by association,” said the first agent.
 

Dominic moved his finger a millimeter closer to the handheld’s screen with its circling arrows.
 

“If it’s a coincidence,” Dominic said, “there’s no harm in telling me.”
 

The agents looked at each other. Dominic could imagine untold volumes of information and arguments streaming between their AI, trying to reason out the dilemma, wondering how far this troublesome human cop could be trusted.
 

“Ryan Enterprises,” the agent said. “An insubstantial metatrail between Oates, Hawes, and Ryan Enterprises vanished today as well, but our best analysis suggests it means nothing.”
 

Dominic smiled.

He couldn’t investigate any of this once he released the case to the agents. He couldn’t search The Beam to learn more…because these weren’t really men sharing the room, but something else entirely. He couldn’t even discuss it.

But he could wonder. And, although he could never share it, he could
know
.

Chapter Three

“Come in, dear,” said a doddering old voice.
 

Kai stood in front of Rachel Ryan’s complex,
Alpha Place
written in stone above the door. There had been a doorman, but Kai had found an entertaining way to distract him without raising his suspicions — though she
had
managed to raise something else. Right now, that doorman was two blocks down, asleep behind a refuse bin. Kai didn’t think he’d wonder why when he woke up. Men naturally relaxed after they came — but thanks to some creative sex toys and a bit of nanobot help, this one had come six times. Kai had given him a sedative before dragging him away with her obfuscation add-on activated, but when he woke, the man would probably just assume he’d jizzed himself out cold with the attractive stranger.
 

“Come in?” Kai puzzled at the intercom. She’d stuck a piece of chewing gum over the camera, but in a building like this it was entirely possible there were a dozen other sensors watching her at all times. She’d slipped in and out of Isaac and Natasha Ryan’s home without being seen, but that was only because nobody had known to sic spies on her. Rachel Ryan — who according to Micah was cream of the Beau Monde — apparently knew better.
 

“Yes, dear,” said the intercom. There was no video. Maybe Micah’s mother had stuck gum over her camera, too. It seemed impossible in a building this nice that the thing could simply be broken. “Come in.”

“You don’t even know who I am.”
 

“You’re Micah’s friend.”
 

Kai looked up then around. She was trying to spot flying cameras — a joke, considering they could be hidden just about anywhere, or possibly watching her from space. But there was more setting off her alarms than just recognition; “Micah’s friend” implied not just that Rachel knew a brown-haired woman in a short skirt was at her door, but that she knew who Kai was and how she was tied to Micah. The first could have come from Beau Monde Beam access. But the second? Nobody other than Nicolai and Doc (ahem…
Kate)
knew her connection to Micah.
 

There was a click as the door’s lock disengaged. At the same time, a barely audible hum stopped purring. Kai hadn’t noticed the hum until it was gone, but hearing it stop gave her a chill. If she’d used her add-ons to force the lock, what strange force field would have she found herself stepping through? She’d heard rumors of anti-augment protections, but they were only rumors — and, she thought, highly illegal to develop. Those rumors alone were enough to give her Orion memories a run for their money.
 

“Come on in, Kai,” said the voice.
 

Kai stared at the elegant-looking front door of Alpha Place. It looked like polished oak, but its heart was probably three-inch Plasteel. She verified this by touching the fine brass knob and dragging it partway open. The door moved without friction, but she could tell it was heavy. Plasteel could practically withstand a nuke blast at one inch thick, so using this much in the door made a statement beyond practicality.
This place is serious business,
it said. And Kai, looking at it, heard a second warning behind it:
If we’ve shown you the door’s defenses, you’d better believe there are plenty of defenses we’ve kept hidden, too.
 

This wasn’t how this visit was supposed to go. She suddenly felt woefully underprepared. Usually, Kai felt confident to handle just about anything, knowing that if a situation turned against her, at least she’d be able to fight or sweet-talk her way out. Even if she had to flee a murder scene, Kai felt confident she could get through any window, climb to any roof, leap to safety and hide among the gutter’s forgotten tribes.