Profiteer

Jonah tumbles through the air. Above him is a blue cloudless sky. Below him is the green foam of the waste reclamation tank. Blue. Green. Blue. Green.

 

The pieces of the window twinkled as they fell, a mutant snowfall, alternately seeming transparent and mirrored. Glass. Mirror. Glass. Mirror.

 

Blue. Green.

 

Glass. Mirror.

 

He splashes into the waste tank. The tailored bacteria begin to feed. The pain begins.

 

There was a crash as the remains of the window hit the ground. The chair bounced off the desk in the interview room, spun, and tumbled to the ground. In the distance, the sirens continued.

 

Dom raised his left hand and saw lacerations on the pseudoflesh leaking clear liquid. The pigment was off, and it looked as though he was beholding a flayed chromium skeleton.

 

Dom wanted to cry but found himself unable to.

 

<>

 

* * * *

 

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

 

Glass Ceilings

 

 

“We hate that which is too much like ourselves.”

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

 

“There is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and others.”

—Michel de Montaigne

(1533-1592)

 

 

Tetsami followed Zanzibar and Shane out of the control center and almost jumped out of her skin when the alarm sounded.

 

Ahead of her, Zanzibar inclined her head slightly, as if listening to something, and turned around. “That’s nothing to be concerned about.”

 

From your face, it don’t look it, lady.

 

However, Tetsami didn’t challenge her. It was probably the truth—as far as it went. The only one in any immediate danger was probably Dom. Whatever mainspring had been tightening in the CEO-man’s skull had been close to snapping ever since she’d met the guy.

 

Tetsami rode in the elevator with Zanzibar and the prisoner, and decided that she was pretty damn sick of surprises.

 

This whole damn complex was one of Dom’s surprises—just like the insurance money. It seemed that every time she almost believed he thought of her as a partner in this heist, every time she believed that they might actually have an equal share of this crap, something was sprung to remind her that she was way out of her depth.

 

Damn it, it was her job. Dom might be backing the enterprise, but without her he’d be lost. He wouldn’t even know what he needed. If this were any other group of Godwin freelancers, she’d be in command of this heist.

 

But Dom wasn’t another Godwin freelancer. He was a CEO-man who breathed his own superiority as if it was air.

 

She wanted to strangle him.

 

“Since we made it unobserved to Proudhon, I think it’s probably safe to link up with some of my people on the way back,” he’d said.

 

Some of his people, sheesh.

 

“Some people” turned out to be just about fourteen hundred employees who had managed to escape the invasion of GA&A, and the linkup place happened to be a massive commune that Dom had apparently invested in sometime during the past year.

 

A bolt-hole known only to him and his security people, just in case, as though he was expecting all this crap.

 

In other words, he owned the place outright. The Diderot Commune was an asset that was worth that cashed-in insurance policy several times over.

 

The elevator reached one of the residential sublevels and Zanzibar deposited the prisoner—or was Shane an ally now? Once the door closed, the two of them were left alone in the corridor. Tetsami noted the absence of the two guards that had accompanied Shane up to the control center and decided that Shane was, indeed, an ally.

 

Dom’s security chief was looking at her with an expression of vague disapproval. “We’ll need to find you quarters for the night, and get you on the security computers.”

 

Tetsami shrugged. Zanzibar was another surprise, one that Tetsami didn’t like, though she couldn’t say why.

 

No, that was a little self-deception. Tetsami knew exactly why she didn’t like Zanzibar. It was because Zanzibar seemed to know Dom so much better than she did. A stupid thing to be irritated by. After all, Zanzibar had apparently been working for Dom ever since GA&A got off the ground.

 

“Follow me.” Zanzibar waved her along. As Tetsami followed her, she decided that Zanzibar’s height didn’t help.

 

Tetsami startled herself by asking Zanzibar, “You don’t like me, do you?”

 

The question seemed to take Zanzibar aback. She stopped walking and looked down at Tetsami. They had stopped in one of the ubiquitous half-finished corridors that peppered the massive commune building like cholesterol deposits in an old circulatory system. “Why do you say that?”

 

“Come on. Ever since I got here, you’ve been treating me like an active germ culture—or maybe a census taker. You look like you really want to throw me in with our marine friend.”