The Beam: Season Two (22 page)

Kate couldn’t bring herself to answer. She smiled and tried to puff out her chest, pressing her breasts against her shirt. Why wasn’t it colder in here? It had been cold most other places in the station. She needed her attention-getters to stand and demand the man’s eyes.
 

“What’s this here?” said Levy. “Wait. Never mind. Sorry. Just part of the docking hatch.”
 

Kate exhaled.
 

Levy puttered around for another few minutes. Kate looked at her wrist, again forgetting that the time would never appear there again. She didn’t think she was supposed to touch the shuttle while it was being inspected, so she pulled out her handheld. Nearly twenty minutes had passed. Maybe she wouldn’t have time for coffee after all.
 

“Excuse me,” she said.

Levy looked up.
 

“Are all the inspections this thorough?” She forced a small smile. “It’s just that I need to be going.”
 

The inspector’s eyes ticked toward his booth, where Kate’s roster and profile were still visible on the dedicated screen.
 

“I show your departure as 4:35 Universal.”
 

“Well, yes, but I need to…I was hoping to grab something for the trip.”
 

“That isn’t your lunch on the seat?” He pointed into the compartment.
 

“Coffee.” She made an embarrassed-sounding “you caught me” noise. “I need my coffee, or I go crazy.”
 

“Do you get headaches?”
 

“Well…”
 

“Is it a medical condition?”
 

“No, but…”
 

“I’m sorry. I think we’re going to be on high alert for a while, after the recent busts. See, it’s not the ones we grab that are the problem. It’s the ones that we realize must have slipped through before and since, the ones we didn’t catch. Lunis trafficking is a big deal. These help a lot — ” He pointed to the box in the corner. “ — but shuttles are
huge
to nanobots, and…well, let’s just say that it pays to give them time to do their jobs, and that it’s better safe than sorry.”
 

Kate swallowed. “Nanobots?”
 

She thought of the shuttle compartments, invisible to all but the most thorough prodding by human hands, and entirely invisible to the human eye. The machined surfaces were nearly perfect, and the micro-holograms projected to cover the minuscule gaps made the craft all but impregnable — again to human and known-mechanical inspection. But if the inspectors were now including armies of microscopic officers among their ranks…

There was a shrill noise in the booth. Kate looked at the shuttle, directly at the main concealed compartment. The inspector’s eyes followed hers then studied her face.
 

“Your heart rate seems to be climbing,” the inspector said, coming around to Kate’s side of the shuttle. They were side by side, the shuttle’s curved side to Kate’s right and Levy’s left. Right where most of the moondust would be if he found a good reason to look hard.

“I need my coffee,” she said.

But before the inspector could respond, Kate sensed movement in the corner of her eye. A new red line had appeared on the shuttle’s side, directly along the middle of the upper edge of the concealed hatch. As she watched with horror, the line spread and slowly traced the outline of the entire compartment door.
 

Inspector Levy looked at the red-outlined rectangle then at Kate. Behind him in the booth, his screen was still flashing with a stress alarm.
 

“Well now, Miss Rigby,” he said. “I guess we need to have ourselves a chat.”

Chapter 5

Natasha folded one long, shapely leg over the other. Her tight red dress crept up higher on her thigh. She cocked her head to the side and ran a hand down her neck, behind her long red hair, and onto her chest. She appeared a sexy variety of exhausted, and in need of a cool beverage.
 

“Don’t pull that shit with me,” said Jameson Gray, sitting opposite Natasha. He was immaculately dressed in a black suit with a dark-blue shirt and a darker-blue band tie. His dark-brown hair was perfect, wet-looking, and slicked back. He had very white teeth, but Natasha had always found them more magnetic than odd.
 

“What?”
 

“Being all Jennifer Beals in
Flashdance
to try and get your way.”
 

“Who? And what?”
 

Jameson gave Natasha an over-the-top roll of his eyes and an exaggerated sigh. “You’re such a philistine, Natasha. I swear, if I didn’t love you so much, I’d never agree to help you with anything. You think
Space Caper
is the height of cinema. You listen to Samuel Bolton. Get some culture, you bitch.”
 

Natasha rolled her eyes back at Jameson. He was fantastically handsome, and his looks (natural, she believed; even without nanos he’d have been this charming in his actual thirties decades before) were a big key to his success. He’d made a fortune doing grand on-stage illusions for years before Natasha had come along to join him in the Beau Monde. Before that, he’d been a street magician with an appeal strong enough to engender a following that was almost cult-like. They called themselves “Jamesonites,” were mostly female and middle-aged, and probably all had poster images of him permanently displayed on their bedroom ceilings.
 

“I’m not being
Fleshdance
, or whatever.”
 

“
Flashdance
,” Jameson corrected. “
Fleshdance
was that bad burlesque show that used to play at Boys’ Town.”
 

“I thought they shut that place down?”
 

Jameson reached out and swiped at the end of Natasha’s regal nose. “Girls are so cute when they’re naive.” He straightened. “And yes, you are
totally
being vampy. You don’t even know you’re doing it. Is that how you get your way with Isaac?”
 

Natasha rolled her eyes. “I get my way with Isaac by doing what I want.”
 

“Is that what you’re doing now? Getting your way with Isaac? To show him you can do what you want?”
 

Natasha sighed then stood. She tried not to look at the large white bed across the room. It was Natasha who’d requested this encounter, and you couldn’t request a meeting and then insist on getting together in the other person’s space. She’d used one of her own Viazo spaces and hadn’t realized until Jameson’s avatar materialized in front of her that she’d accidentally put them in the bedroom where her cyber-lover, Andre, usually ravaged her. So far, Jameson had been discreet enough not to mention it.
 

“I’m planning my concert.”
 

“Your fuck-you concert?”
 

“My
comeback
concert.”

“Don’t call it a comeback. You’ve been here for years,” Jameson said, as if quoting someone.
 

“What are you talking about?”
 

“Seriously, Natasha. You’re as culturally bankrupt as a cave person.”
 

She put her hands on her hips and looked around the all-white room. The Viazo was able to blend surreality with reality, and to do it with the precision of the Salvador Dali paintings her brother-in-law loved so much. There was a window opposite them, opening to a pristine beach and crashing azure waves. But the window wasn’t actually mounted in a wall and simply hung in open space. As she paced, Natasha could see how it floated and how she could see the white room behind it.
 

“You’re the most Enterprise person I know, Jameson. So okay, I’m pissed at Isaac. But you of all people have to agree that it’s important to make a splash.”
 

“Yes. So you can humiliate your husband.”
 

“No, so that I can make a sensational re-entrance into Enterprise, where I should have been all along.”
 

“And thereby humiliate your husband.”
 

She put her hands on her hips. “You’re not listening to me.”

Jameson uncrossed and recrossed his legs, then fussily picked at a piece of lint that wouldn’t, of course, be there. Avatars were programmed to be as real and as close in appearance to their hosts as possible, but no one wanted lint or dust. Mites and their ilk had to stay in the real world, back where Natasha was a body lying in her office rig.
 

“Oh, I’m listening all right.” Jameson put his hands on one knee and looked up at Natasha with his dark eyes. Some of the crasser Jamesonites said that Gray could fuck you through your holo projector, using his eyes as a dick. Natasha had never understood what that actually meant, but sometimes, paradoxically, she looked into his eyes and understood it fine. “You just don’t hear yourself. The error is in what you’re saying, not what I’m hearing.”
 

“Jameson, you put on the largest, most elaborate, most lavish shows in the history of…”
 

“Because I’m an illusionist, hon.” Jameson stood, extended his right hand, and twiddled his fingers. Natasha watched as flame danced at their tips. Then, all of a sudden, Natasha felt her bra pop open. “Illusion is about creating flare to draw the eye while you go about what you’re really doing.”
 

Natasha swiped open a window and hit a single illuminated button to reset her avatar. She felt her breasts snug up against her again, where they belonged.
 

“That’s impressive,” she said.
 

“Don’t you remember when I made the moon vanish?”
 

“I mean that you can open a bra.”
 

“I’m a man of many talents.”
 

“And
as
a man of many talents, why don’t you tell me how what I want to do with my concert is any different from what you do at your shows?”
 

Jameson shook his beautiful head. “I create flash to sell tickets. You sing. You’re only insisting on flash to twist the knife.”

“I’ve lost credibility by being Directorate. You know what they say: ‘Go big or go home.’ If I don’t do something sensational, I’ll look like I’m crawling back. I’ll look like the loser.”
 

There was a table (white, of course) between the chairs. Jameson drew a rectangle on it using two sets of index fingers and thumbs then pulled his hands upward. The holo web they’d been using to plan the concert sprang into existence like one of Jameson’s old parlor tricks. He began to pull idea bubbles from the center and toss them aside. They rolled away like billiard balls painted in sap, rotating several times at the ends of his fingers and then falling still. He finally seemed to locate what he was looking for and reached into the web’s center like a movie monster groping in a victim’s chest cavity to pull out his heart. He tossed it back at the web, and as the idea struck it, the web sloughed open around it like sluggish tenpins under a bowling ball’s assault.

Jameson pointed at the bubble then tented his showy magician’s fingers on its top to revolve it for Natasha’s inspection.
 

“No. Look. Integrity and trust. Remember that? It’s what we started with. Remember starting with integrity and trust…not big money and making a huge political statement?”
 

Natasha rolled her eyes and slumped back into the chair. This was so like Jameson. She couldn’t argue. Of
course
they’d started with integrity and trust. Jameson had asked her what had formed the cornerstone of her initial rise to fame and what she should base her comeback upon. Natasha herself had given the answer. The other cornerstones, tucked somewhere in the concert plan web, were vulnerability and humility. If she fought him, he’d bring those two up. And as much as her desired concert flew in the face of building integrity and trust with her fans, it
really
flew in the face of vulnerability and humility.
 

“But I need to make the political statement if I want to rebuild trust.” She paused then more quietly confessed her deeper issue. “I sold out, Jameson.”
 

“You did what you did. I didn’t go Directorate, but I’ve sold out plenty. I mean, think about it. Who makes the
moon
vanish? It’s such a huge illusion that everyone assumes I’m just having a cloud dropped into the sky in front of it or something. The bigger the illusion, the more time I spend trying to prove that the obvious tricks aren’t the ones I’m actually using. It’s a mess of explanation and starts to feel like I need a lawyer: ‘Mr. Jameson hereby certifies that he is not using any Beam-related means, weather control, camera tricks, lighting techniques or mirrors, nanotechnology, etc. to create this onstage illusion.’ How is that a real feat? Nobody can even get down to seeing the genius of how I actually do it because they’re too mired in the obvious things I’m not actually doing. But as stupid as it is, people love those big illusions. And darling, I promise you, there are plenty of days I’d rather be back to doing card tricks in Central Park.”
 

“How
did
you make the moon disappear?”