The Beam: Season Two (50 page)

“
Your
aims, you mean?” It was starting to sound like Purcell was going to deny Isaac’s request, and the renewed sense of indignation was causing Isaac to say things he shouldn’t. He didn’t mean to step over the line but found himself doing it anyway. But again, Purcell smiled.
 

“You aren’t proposing a back-and-forth.” Purcell looked up at Isaac. “You are proposing spite.”
 

“Spite
is
a back-and-forth.”
 

“I want ‘resentment.’ ‘Stirring the pot.’ Maybe ‘malcontent.’ Once we reach ‘strife,’ though, problems surface. The thing with those kids is a powder keg. It could go either way. Maybe everyone will settle down. Or on the other hand, they may just keep blaming each other, using the children as weapons.”
 

“You can’t control that?”
 

Purcell shrugged. “Not my department.”

Realizing how it looked, Isaac pulled an end table forward and sat on its top. It was a calculated gamble. He was going to look like a pathetic idiot, perched atop that table, but he
already
looked like a pathetic idiot. Maybe he’d look so pathetic that Purcell would see his point: that Isaac and the Directorate, as little as he wanted to admit it, needed some mercy.

“Please,” he said.
 

“I don’t think it’s necessary. And it could be excessively disruptive.”
 

“It will only disrupt
her.”

“Then what’s the point? It’s not my job to handle your wife for you.”
 

“I meant as a symbol. She’s making a stand for the righteousness of her own petty little ass as Directorate then hopping to Enterprise. She wants to have her cake and eat it too. The first plan was to humiliate Directorate by giving us the finger, but then she must have realized how much it would make her look like a sellout. She wants to sell out, but doesn’t want anyone to notice. This little, loud event is the answer. But the other thing it’s going to do — what Natasha
intends
it to do; it’s the whole reason she’s doing it — is to make it obvious that the parties aren’t really that different. Her argument is that she can span the two. Because she wants the Enterprise to see that although she’s been on the other side for years, she’s really one of them at heart. And she wants her Directorate fans to feel that she’s not abandoning them then proving how ‘Directorate’ and ‘all for one, regardless of individual benefit’ she is by holding this first concert now, before Shift, when it can’t benefit her financially. She wants it to look like the only reason she’d ever do it — from both parties’ sides — is because she’s basically walking the line down the middle. Because that’s how Natasha is. She wants everyone to love her.
Everyone
. She won’t pick one party or the other, don’t you see?”
 

Purcell’s arrogant eyes softened then ticked down. His mouth made a partial frown, and then he looked back up at Isaac.

“Okay. I do see.” He sighed and shook his head. “But it’s still a risk.” Then, more firmly as he seemed to decide something, “And it won’t matter anyway.”
 

“How can you allow one of the world’s biggest stars to just sashay back and forth across party lines? She wants to show people that affiliation doesn’t matter.”
 

“At the top. But not further down.”

Feeling his edge slipping, Isaac repeated that cursed word:
“Please.”

“There’s no point, Isaac. After this Shift, the first phase will be complete, regardless of who ‘wins’ it.”
 

“Everything is against me. Against Directorate. There’s supposed to be balance, but I look like a fool.”
 

“It doesn’t matter.”
 

“It matters to me,” said Isaac.
 

Purcell looked at him for a long moment. Isaac saw many things in that look, but the most obvious was a sense of pity. It was the pathetic look he’d have given a drunk in a gutter, begging for a few credits to buy a bottle to temporarily banish his shakes.
 

“Fine,” Purcell finally said. “But even if you use our resources, the job is yours. As will be the blame if things go wrong.”

Isaac sighed. He started to say, “Thank you,” but before the first syllable could pass his lips, Purcell’s avatar was gone.

Chapter 9

According to Jimmy, Omar was across town handling something “very important” while he spied on Kate and Jimmy’s contentious meeting. Still, despite the situation’s gravity, Kate asked and prodded and joked about Omar and his “very important stuff” to Jimmy because that was what Kate did even when she was nervous.
Especially
when she was nervous.
 

She was in some serious shit, and there was no kidding herself about it. She was a smuggler, always undercover by design, with a set of identifiers that, while valid, could be made to vanish. Omar could kill her or turn her in. He had been known to use both avenues in the past, when his colleagues’ aims stepped out of alignment with his.
 

Jimmy ordered Kate to walk through the restaurant door first. He’d used a swab to apply a wide swatch of pheromone to the back of her neck. Jimmy was carrying a weapon loaded with projectiles that matched the pheromone (and liked it so much, they’d home in on it when fired), but before they left the restaurant, he said almost apologetically, “This is just in case, so don’t make me blow your head from your neck for no reason, okay?”

Despite his former outburst and the hair-pulling episode, it seemed like Jimmy wanted to smooth things over during their walk to the bank of hoverskippers then even more so during their hoverskipper ride across town. He let Kate walk without restraints; he let her fly her own skipper; he kept the weapon that would kill her stowed in his pocket. Kate surmised it was because there were a few ways the meeting with Omar could work out. One way (the one everyone wanted, if the situation could be salvaged) would keep Kate and Jimmy in a close working relationship. If that happened, Kate would retain a position of trust. They’d be closer to partners than employer and employee, and partners couldn’t have poison between them. The other outcome had Jimmy killing her, in which case acrimony wouldn’t matter. She chose to take Jimmy’s manner now as an encouraging sign.

After Jimmy had told Kate that Omar wanted to talk to her, he’d proposed (not insisted) that they meet somewhere public. There was no reason not to, right? After all, there was a fair chance that what was to come would end up being nothing more than a mutually beneficial business meeting between equals. And perhaps most encouragingly, Omar had agreed to let Kate decide where they’d end up. As a show of trust, which right now was sorely needed.

Jimmy pulled his skipper beside Kate’s as they stopped at a traffic light. Again, he said, “Where are we going?”
 

“I’m still thinking,” said Kate.
 

“I have to tell Omar where to meet us.”
 

“Where is Omar now?”
 

“He’s nearby.”

“Where?”
 

“Does it matter?”
 

It did. If Kate decided to run, she had to know she was running
away
from Omar. Not that it mattered. Jimmy had painted her neck with pheromone anyway — because this was a business meeting among partners.
 

“Not at all,” said Kate.
 

“So where are we going?”
 

Kate sighed. She’d pushed this far enough. She’d hoped that as they crossed the city, something would occur to her, but nothing was coming. She didn’t want to run, even if she could. As much as she hated to admit it, the best scenario would be to keep working for Jimmy, which meant working for Omar. Omar was a known quantity. Thanks to years working with him as Doc, Kate knew exactly how Omar thought, what he was likely to do, and just how little others mattered relative to his own goals and bottom line. It was a case of the devil he knew, and Micah Ryan was a devil he
didn’t
know at all. If she blew this with Omar, the man would smear his new face across The Beam. If the right people asked the right questions, Kate’s history — and the validity of her Beam ID — might come into question. She couldn’t have a second powerful enemy chasing her. Even if she wanted to go through another refurb (she very much didn’t), she couldn’t afford it.
 

But if she played her cards right with Omar and managed to stay where she was — offer to pay for the dust, retrieve it, wash fucking dishes if she had to — then she could continue making good money using the salesmanship skills that God had given Thomas Stahl. She could still move back up to where she used to be in the Presque Beau, with avenues for advancement. She’d have connections and powerful friends. If, that was, Kate could make things work and tell Omar what he needed to hear… because any way they sliced it, continuing their working relationship would be best for Omar, too.
 

“The mall.”

“Which mall?”
 

“Summit.”
 

Beside her, Jimmy cocked his head. The light turned green, and Kate pulled away slow enough for Jimmy to keep up.
 

“That the one near the crater?”
 

“No. Just ahead. The underground one. With the Beam surround.”
 

“Oh,” said Jimmy, speaking over the breeze of their sensibly paced, within-speed-limits travel. “Do they have an Orange Julius?”
 

“Yeah.”
 

“You like Orange Julius?”
 

“Sure,” said Kate. She’d never had one.
 

“I’ll buy you an Orange Julius when we get there.”
 

“Peachy,” said Kate.
 

The traffic light ahead was a double-tier, so instead of giving them a stop, it gave them an up arrow. Kate hopped above the cross traffic, then came down as the mall’s entrance appeared. From double-height, the entrance looked like a massive funnel in the ground. The two perpendicular streets leading into it dipped at the funnel’s edge then curled around it to the right, following the path one would expect water to take in a downward vortex if the entire island flooded. The roads were for the conventional cars that wanted to enter the parking garage, but Kate had always thought that they were far too optimistic of humanity’s competence behind the wheel. Hovercars and hoverskippers and screetbikes could pilot to one of the lanes in the middle of the funnel and descend while staying level, but conventional cars had to bank around the edges in what amounted to an extreme high-speed curve. The mag carriers beneath the street would hold them fast, but Kate had seen plenty of cars in the subterranean garage with their contents plastered against one window because the driver hadn’t made the turn fast enough.
 

They descended, pulled into two adjacent recharge bays, and secured the hoverskippers with their IDs. They took the elevator down. Kate watched Jimmy through the ride. He kept tossing Kate small, conflicted looks, seemingly uncertain about how he was supposed to behave. Was he an armed escort whose purpose it was to threaten Kate and keep her in line? Or was he a man who’d been too harsh with a (rather attractive) female employee and now had to make nice? She didn’t know what Omar’s temperament would be, but the good news was that following that first exchange in the restaurant, Jimmy seemed equally uncertain about it.
 

The elevator’s doors opened, and Kate found herself looking out into what appeared to be an enormous open-air space. Above, on a domed Beam-surface ceiling, a bright sun shone down through a sky pocked with a few small fluffy clouds. Kate could feel the simulated warmth on her skin but knew that even without her nanos, she’d never get a sunburn. The illusion was disorienting, though, and seconds after leaving the elevator, she’d lost her bearings. The doors had opened and closed behind her, but now that she looked back, all Kate could see was more open space. The only thing below her was a concrete walkway cutting through swatches of fragrant grass.
 

Jimmy said, “I’m going to get us Orange Juliuses.”

He walked toward the booth (which the environment had made into a kind of charming rustic fair stand; Kate had no idea if the actual structure was as she saw it) and left her where she was. She looked after him, almost allowing herself to be duped by the 360-degree dome and the illusion that she was outside. Even if she were actually outdoors, though, she’d decided she wouldn’t run. Running was a dead end. She’d clawed her way to the top of her profession as Doc, and taking the reset as Kate (a reset in both person and social standing) had been incredibly demoralizing. She wished the bullshit with the inspector had never occurred. If she could put it behind her (and if Omar would
allow
her to put it behind her), Kate had every intention of moving forward. She didn’t want to be a criminal on the run. She wanted to be comfortable again, and for life to be as boring as a smuggler’s life could be.
 

She watched Jimmy at the booth, knowing that he’d walked away and left her alone as a gesture of good faith. He could kill her from where he stood, but she wouldn’t make him try. She was here to play ball and intended to do exactly that.