by Sean Platt
Natasha looked at Micah after he pulled his hand from hers, and Micah saw her eyes soften into fear. The glance kept him from shouting at her, even though she was Jameson’s buddy. Maybe she’d been part of it, too.
“It’s blocked,” Isaac said from behind.
“I know it’s blocked,” Micah snapped.
“What do we do?”
“I don’t know, Isaac. Maybe you should fucking think for yourself for a change.”
Micah didn’t look back, not trusting himself to hold back a brimming torrent of abuse if he met his brother’s eyes. Isaac and Natasha had both become sheep the second the crisis had erupted. Oh, both had had plenty to say about the way Micah always played big in their day-to-day, but now that lives were on the line, they wanted Micah to lead them. That line about being your brother’s keeper? Oh yes, Micah knew it well. He was keeper of both his idiot brother and his bitch of a sister-in-law. Two corpses shackled to his ankles, unable to move unless Micah dragged them.
Instead of looking back at Isaac, Micah focused on the hallway gridlock ahead. He saw only tuxedos and gowns jammed behind what must be a locked door, but he could hear stomping coming from the left and right. He pushed his albatrosses back into a short hallway, nudging them out of the way like troublesome cargo, and peeked around the corner.
He saw blades. Guns. Blood.
Back into the room behind Isaac, at their small group’s rear. The doors here swung on old-fashioned hinges and looked like wood, but in a place like Craig Braemon’s, they’d have Plasteel and carbon mesh cores. If the locks were as offline as the front door seemed to be stuck online, he could always shove furniture against the door.
Inside, Micah found their party expanded to five. There were two men in workshirts already in the study, a panel removed from the wall, working as if nothing was amiss. When they didn’t turn toward Micah, Isaac, and Natasha with weapons, Micah decided to ignore them. He closed the door, which seemed to lock — but who could unlock it, Micah had no idea.
“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, “Something?”
“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 tum
ult 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.
She turned to find Nicolai setting up the rinky-dink hotspot and tapping the canvas screen. He made a small eyebrows-up expression showing surprise then turned to look at Kai from behind his pointless round glasses.
“Let me guess,” she said. “York got you in after all.”
Nicolai nodded slowly. “Seems so,” he said, his voice thick with wonder.
Kai was about to answer — maybe start the peacemaking process — when a thin blonde girl in a blue gown blinked into existence near the room’s doorway. She didn’t enter or slowly materialize. It was like a jump cut in an old film: one moment she wasn’t there, and the next she was.
“Hold your breath,” she said in a soft voice. “It will get worse before it gets better.”
Beside the woman, there was a tremendous booming as the concealed door turned to splinters and shrapnel.
Chapter Ten
The doors to Craig Braemon’s apartment must have opened less than a minute before Sam arrived because just as he watched streetlights along the block blink on and off and Beam screens go dark, he was struck with a wave of well-dressed people who made him totter then fall.
Once the rush of people had passed, Sam stood from the street and brushed himself off. Amazingly, he appeared to be unstomped, unmauled, unflattened. He’d been kicked once, but the crowd had been remarkably agile. They were focused only on going the opposite direction as Sam meant to go, and it was as if they’d carefully avoided him even in their panic. Trampling Sam would unseat them, and if they fell, they’d die.
Or so they’d seemed to think. With the crowd rushing away behind him, Sam found the street curiously quiet. Motors and fans that should be running were intermittently silent. Lights continued to blink. Nobody was pursuing
the people who’d seemed so chased. It was just Sam and a street and, ahead, the mouth of the place he’d been running so hard to reach.
The thought made him surge on despite the danger. Those partygoers had definitely come from the Respero fundraiser, clearly terrified. Many had been splashed with blood, and all looked disheveled, awash with animal panic. Something had to be waiting ahead. But Sam saw nothing.
He was running again in seconds, trying to make himself ignore the bodies and injured people littering the doorway. Beyond was a large room that looked like a slaughterhouse. Sam saw gore everywhere, tattered clothing, spilled tables that might once have held expensive hors d’oeuvres and champagne. The place held a strange silent echo, as if it missed the recent departure of so many warm bodies.
Sam focused on his pounding feet. He leaped over the dead, many of them twisted into contortions, their features unrecognizable. He dodged what looked like body parts.
Only after taking several big strides did Sam finally stop.
Someone had done this. So where were they?
With his feet stilled, he stopped to listen. His errand’s urgency pounded in rhythm with his overworked heart. He tried to quell his heaving breath, but doing so made him lightheaded. He pulled up his shirt and breathed into the fabric to muffle his exhales, but still he couldn’t hear much, if anything.
There’d been a crack, like a lead-slinger gunshot from an old movie, as he’d entered. Now, from that direction, he could hear a commotion. But it was a small ruckus, indicative of only a few rather than the dozens of mechanized assailants he’d seemed to see on the Beam feed.
So where were the rest?
Had the security system kicked on? There must be one. It would be hard to tell registered partygoers from those who appeared as intruders, especially if the cops hadn’t been paying attention. From what Sam had seen on the feed on the way over, the cops had been among the first to go. Sam had spotted a few on the feed and another few dead in the big room — unequipped, apparently, to take down the cyborg things that had seemed to come up from the floor itself. If there was still human security in the area, Sam couldn’t see it. And house security? Maybe the safeties had been set low, allowing human protection to take up the slack.
