The Beam: Season Three (75 page)

“Hey,” Micah shouted to the workmen. “Secure this door.”
 

“You
secure it,” one of them snapped. In the exposed control panel, something flashed, and the other man swore. The first man turned back, ignoring Micah.
 

“Maybe you didn’t hear the shit going on out there,” Micah said.

The second workman turned. He was holding a weapon Micah had never seen, leveled at Micah’s chest.
 

“Maybe you’d better stay where you are and keep your mouth shut.”
 

Natasha stepped back. Isaac let her settle against him, but then Natasha turned, saw Isaac, and almost slapped him.
 

The workman shoved the weapon into his pants then turned back to the panel. They began chattering urgently while Micah did as instructed. But of course Natasha didn’t listen. She never did.
 

“What are you trying to do?” she asked.
 

Outside, there was a blast of some sort. Micah heard splintering wood, maybe shattering glass coming from the front door.
 

“To get that window open.” One of them pointed at what seemed to be a rather ordinary window, looking out on the street beyond.
 

Isaac picked up a chair. The workman laughed.
 

“It’s not glass. It’s a projection.”

“Oh.”
 

“Something locked the place down.”
 

Micah said, “Some
thing?”
 

“During your little stage show. There’s some sort of a glitch. I can’t even pull up the…”

 
The other man, looking over at his companion’s pause, asked, “Did you get it?”
 

“No. I was just noticing
this.”
He pointed at something on a screen under the removed wall panel. Apparently, the parlor, like much of Braemon’s high-end place, had real fabrics and plaster in the walls. To Micah’s mind, that made the entire apartment more quaint than useful, but Braemon probably thought it spoke of elegance.

“Dammit,” said the other man.
 

“What is that? What’s making it hang?”

“I don’t know. It’s drawing most of the processing power of the…shit, look at this.”
 

“That can’t be right.”
 

The door seemed to shake with impact behind them. But it must have been someone running by rather than trying to enter because a moment later there was only the same sounds of shots and breaking as before.

“Can you get the window open or not?” Micah demanded.
 

Ignoring Micah, the first man said,
“Shit.”

“Shit is right. You want to crawl in and unplug it all then try an isolated restart?”

The other laughed, as if this all made sense but the idea was preposterous.
 

“So it won’t open. Because of…” He trailed off, his finger indicating something in the panel. The other man must have understood because he sighed.
 

The men turned back to Micah, Isaac, and Natasha. The one with the weapon — now raised again — tipped his chin toward the door.
 

“Back out into the hallway. You first.”
 

“Why? We’re safe here.”
 

“Because I said so.”
 

Isaac stepped in front of Natasha. The move was probably supposed to be gallant, protecting her from harm, but it only annoyed Natasha. She shoved him away.
 

Isaac said, “We’re staying. You can go.”
 

The man with the gun rolled his eyes. The weapon dipped a little. To Micah, it was an almost reasonable gesture, as if the man had grabbed his gun just in case, but didn’t want to use it if he could avoid it.
 

“You don’t understand. The canvas here is under attack. The apartment is a sealed environment and has about ten layers of louvers and filters to keep the air pure. Problem is, it’s controlled by The Beam. If we don’t get out soon, we’ll run out of air. And that’s assuming the security system doesn’t decide we’re unwanted visitors and retaliate first.”
 

“That’s ridiculous,” Isaac said.
 

The first man nodded toward the panel. “Be my guest. Pull up the roster. You tell me who’s authorized and who’s not because to me it’s all garbage. The network connection is falling apart, and the fucking processing buffer is full.
Full
. How is that possible, if not a malware attack?”
 

Micah had no idea what any of it meant. He understood “attack,” though, and that was enough. But Isaac was still posturing, hands now on his hips. Behind them, the door shook again, underscoring an important and troubling issue: They’d come in through a single point of entry. If whoever had stormed the party decided to knock, they were trapped.
 

“You want to go back out there, go ahead. My wife and I are staying.”
 

“Speak for yourself, asshole.” Natasha walked right at the workmen, practically impaling herself on the man’s weapon. But it must have been the last thing the men expected because they let her go past, to the door, to the lock. It took her a second to figure out how to open the thing, but then it turned easily and Natasha was out with her prima donna hips swinging beneath her fancy gala dress.

Too late, Micah heard something coming, full steam ahead.
 

Natasha screamed, backing up.
 

Isaac ran to grab her, but the assailant was already there at the door.

Micah moved to intercept. Between Isaac and Natasha, he had no idea where to go first. He tried for the door, to close it, to shut them back in. There wasn’t time. The newcomer raised his weapon.

A shot fired.
 

A body fell.

Chapter Nine

Behind Kai, the door opened and closed. Nobody had done anything to secure it in the minutes it had taken for Kate to lose her dignity. The noise made Kai flinch; the office door was concealed from the outside, so the fact that someone was entering was, in itself, troubling. But it wasn’t an intruder. It was only Kate, back already.
 

“Guns,” Kate panted, her back to the door, her giant breasts rising and falling.
 

Kai had already instructed her nanos to release endorphins to counteract the adrenaline that had been dogging her since the first incursion, since she’d used the tumult to slip Rachel the deadly cloned cells the old woman had so badly wanted. By then, the magic act was as over as it was going to be. Rachel had been laughing. Either she’d known the show wouldn’t conclude or was excellent at rolling with punches and going with the flow.
 

Well, maybe she
had been
excellent at it. Because Rachel had slumped like an empty sack under Kai’s fingernail barb just as she had in the immersion back at Alpha Place. This time, it was real. Rachel Ryan, rest in peace.
 

Kai didn’t respond to Kate. Nicolai was still at the console, still trying to figure out something he’d more or less assumed would be straightforward: transferring the Stephen York shell to Craig Braemon’s canvas. But the Fi jack rig hadn’t worked, and Nicolai didn’t exactly have a data port in his head. Maybe there was a way to immerse and download York the way they’d uploaded him, but doing so while a war churned outside felt both indulgent and dangerous even if their hideout seemed like a suitably hidden one —
if
there had been an apparent way to do so, which there wasn’t.

“Lots of guns out there,” Kate repeated, facing away from the door. Then she seemed to realize that her back was exposed to all of those guns should they somehow discover and then shoot through the security doors and stepped away. She reached out, locking the thing using a clever manual-looking offline lock. Instead of the screen turning red, it oscillated between red and green in a spastic blink, looking like Christmas lights.

“We heard you the first time,” Nicolai said.
 

“You got that shit uploaded yet?”
 

“Thought you were against my uploading it…
Kate.”
 

Kate stepped forward like a man full of testosterone. Kai stood in her way, chest to chest. Kate looked down, Doc’s familiar lecherous smile spreading onto Kate’s soft features.
 

“Stop it, both of you,” Kai said. She looked over her shoulder at Nicolai. “Maybe we should bail. Maybe we just run out of here and forget about this part.”
 

“Good luck running.” Kate looked toward the door and jerked her thumb. “Party’s still raging out there.
Nobody
went home. It’s like the doors are locked.”
 

Nicolai shook his head, exhaled, tapped the screen, then took a moment to read it. “I see that. Yes, the doors are locked.”
 

“Open them,” said Kate.
 

Nicolai’s head snapped toward Kate, his patience with the tall blonde finally gone. “You’re so helpful. Why don’t
you
unlock them?”
 

“How the fuck’m I supposed to unlock this place?”

Nicolai began to cross the room. “You were going to hack Braemon’s canvas with that scary shit in your head. What a great idea. Having any second thoughts there,
Doc?”
 

Kate shoved Nicolai in the chest. For a minute, it looked like they might come to blows — something that made sense when Kate had been Doc but seemed downright surreal now that Kate was Kate. Kai couldn’t remember how many enhancements the Kate/Doc refurb had included. Was Kate stronger than she looked? It hardly mattered because she was bigger than Nicolai and seemed plenty strong even without artificial help.
 

“Knock it off!” Kai stepped between them. “We’re stuck here, okay? Nothing changes that. You couldn’t get in, and
you
can’t get in either. If you ask me, you’re both idiots for buying into this. Braemon is Beau Monde, and we’re not. The way you said Omar talks, he’s something even
bigger
than Beau Monde. So whose brilliant idea was it to send this chucklehead in to fuck it out of him?”
 

“That wasn’t the whole plan,” Kate said, defensive.
 

“Right. Because you had Doc in your head. And we all know how well things worked out for Doc. We all know the crazy levels of above-Beau-Monde privilege
Doc
had, don’t we?” Kai drolled, her voice dripping sarcasm. “No, it totally makes sense.
Doc
had all sorts of access to people’s shit. That’s why he almost got killed by my boss, almost got pinched as a smuggler, and got his
fucking dick
cut off!” She slapped Kate’s adequately padded chest and stomped away, furious.
 

“It’s not that I can’t get in,” Nicolai said after a moment. “It’s that the Fi is all gummed up, like the firewall broke and everything is streaming in. Just a few minutes ago there was — ”

“I’m pissed at you, too!” Kai blurted, glaring at Nicolai.
 

“Why?”
 

“Because you listened to
this
stupid asshole! Because Micah sent you here, and you were dumb enough to believe him!”
 

“Micah sent you too.”
 

Kai stabbed her finger toward the door hard enough to break through the wood if she’d been closer. “I
did
my job, Nicolai!”

“I can’t control a Beam failure, Kai!” Nicolai snapped back.

There was a booming from outside. Kai’s lips firmed, and she spun to face the two men — one of whom had tits but was still definitely a
man
. She looked down and kicked the small box on the floor toward him. “Just set up a damned hotspot.”
 

Nicolai looked confused, staring down at the bargain peripheral box.
 

“That’s party swag. I doubt a spot like that will even talk to Braemon’s canvas.”
 

“It will if York is as fancy as you think he is,” Kai spat.
 

“It’ll take forever.”
 

“We’ve got nothing but time. Nobody knows the door to this room is even here. If you didn’t have York-vision, even you’d have thought it was a bookcase.”
 

“Someone could blow a hole in here and — ”

This time, Kai kicked the box hard enough that it left the floor and struck Nicolai in the shin. “Just do it! You decided to partner with
her
, and
you
— ” she pointed at Kate, “decided it was smart to partner with
Omar
, who I’ve had to listen to you complain about for years.
You
did this, and now
my
chance to get what I have coming to me might be blown forever. So if there’s a chance, even a little one — ” she kicked the box again, taking a step forward, “then
you will goddamn man up and do what you came here to do in whatever way you can!”
 

There was a noise from Kai’s left. She looked up to see Kate pressing her lips together. A witty rejoinder had been on the way — possibly something to do with Kai, her ovaries, and the former’s hiking up of the latter — but one look at Kai’s expression seemed to keep Kate quiet. Kai had killed one person tonight. It wouldn’t be smart to tease the death of two more.