Android: Free Fall

by William H. Keith

  “Good girl,” I said. “Now, toss the handle on the floor over there. Slowly.”

  She did so.

  “A GATCO monocarb,” I said, glancing at it. “That’s pretty high-end hardware. I thought you must have used a monoknife—”

  “How the hell did you know?” she demanded.

  “What…that someone had planted a bug on me? I have my ways.”

  “No, about the monoknife!”

  “Monofilaments slice through bone clean, almost mirror-smooth,” I told her. “It makes the severed end of the bone look polished. A laser doesn’t.” I was curious. “But why pretend you used a mining laser instead of this little slicer-dicer, here?”

  She shrugged.

  I wasn’t going to pull such a dumb rookie move as bending over to pick up the knife. Instead, I used my foot to edge it further away from her, over toward the wall.

  “Let me guess,” I continued. “When you killed Dow, you wanted it to be spectacular. Bloody. Something that would grab the public’s attention. Right? And if it was a mining laser that killed Dow, it must have been a mining clone that did it. Am I right?”

  She hesitated, then nodded. Damn, that was no good. I needed her to say something for the recording PAD on the desk.

  “So why’d you do it?” I asked.

  “Androids are a threat to all real humans!” Coleman snapped back. “Something had to be done!”

  “What…killing Roger Dow?” I let puzzlement shape the words. “Why kill him? He hated clones as much as you did. And he worked for you!”

  “Yeah, and if it looked like a clone and a bioroid had worked together to kill the dumb bastard, kill him before he met with those senators, it would look like a conspiracy: the androids working against humanity!”

  “And what about the fact that he was your lover? Or didn’t it bother you that he was in bed with a bioroid?”

  That goaded her. I saw the words sting. “The bastard was sleeping with a damned sex-doll!” she snapped. “He dumped me for a clunker! It was a pleasure taking him apart!”

  “I’m sure,” I said. “So why no laser for me?”

  “Who said we didn’t bring one?” a different voice said.

  It was Frank Hodgkins, Coleman’s bodyguard. He’d stepped into the doorway from the hall leveling a military laser at me—a Sunbeam LW2400, with 1.2-kilowatt throughput. “Drop the gun,” he said.

  “Stupid cop,” Coleman said with a sneer, padding toward the monoknife on the floor. “The idea is to kill you exactly the same way we killed Dow! We couldn’t get hold of another tunneler, but this’ll do.”

  I had to make my move, and I had to do it now. If I tamely handed over my H&K, I would still be dead, probably sliced up by the monoknife, like Dow, and the pieces burned with the laser.

  “Okay, okay,” I said, holding up one hand and making like I was going to toss the gun down with the other. But I was watching Coleman, and as she crossed the room she came just a little too close to Hodgkins’s line of fire.

  That was a dumb rookie move. I leaped, and in four-hundredths of a gravity I flew, arrowing directly between Coleman and the muzzle of Hodgkins’s weapon. He swung the rifle, but didn’t fire, unable to shoot without hitting his partner.

  I brought up the H&K two-handed, aiming at Hodgkins as I fell in slow motion. I saw him pivot as Coleman yelled, “Shoot him!” and jumped clear, saw his finger tightening on the laser’s trigger, and immediately squeezed my eyes shut to keep from being blinded. I squeezed off a shot…and another…and a third, firing blind until I plunged right shoulder-first into the room’s carpeting.

  I felt heat, pain, as if someone had turned a welding torch on the back of my left leg.

  I opened my eyes as I bounced, then rolled. Hodgkins had staggered back a step, the military laser scorching a sweeping, charred line across the wall and ceiling. I tried to aim a fourth shot, but he’d stepped back into the hallway and out of my line of fire.

  Coleman, meanwhile, had dived for the monoknife, scooped it up, and released the tiny, silver bead. She leaped toward me—

  I twisted around sideways, bringing my pistol to bear on her, but she snapped down with that damned knife before I could acquire the target, snapped down as I rolled desperately to my right and the invisible thread-blade sliced through the arm of the chair in which I’d spent most of the night.

  She slammed into the chair, a tangled flailing of bare legs and arms. She was trying to pull the blade free—I think the bead had snagged in the chair’s upholstery—so, from the floor, I swung my right leg around to kick her wrist.

  It was an awkward blow, but she yelped and let go of the knife, stumbling back a step. I saw movement at the door, a shadow only, but it was enough to distract me, to make me swing the gun away from Coleman and aim at the doorway.

  “Give it up!” I yelled.

  Hodgkins rolled back around the door and I shut my eyes again, firing at the same instant. I heard him yell, felt a wave of heat wash past my head, singing hair and blistering the wall behind my head.

  The heat snapped off, and I opened my eyes just in time to see Coleman’s back vanishing around the corner.

  Scrambling to my feet, I started after them. There was blood on the wall beside the doorway; I’d hit the bastard. Dropping to my knees, I peeked around the door frame, staying low in case he was waiting for me to show myself.

  He was, ten meters down the hall toward the lobby. I jerked back as he fired, waited a few seconds, then peeked again, high this time. Both of them were gone.

  H&K in hand, I started after them, cursing myself for the stupid rookie move I had managed to commit: no backup. They drill that into you at the Academy: always take along backup, and have the bad guys’ escape routes covered before they beat a hasty retreat.

  I wasn’t entirely sure what I could have done, however. With Coleman listening in on my conversations through the bug in my clothing, I wouldn’t have been able to set the trap without giving the game away. Possibly I could have written a note to the yellow jackets…but the bug might have a video component. Besides, I still didn’t trust the rent-a-cops, despite my nice words and pride-swallowing with Guerrero the evening before.

  Detective work tends to be a one-man show anyway; I’ve never been comfortable with partners.

  I heard shouts coming from just ahead, so I knew I was heading in the right direction. My leg was screaming at me, but I jogged down a ramp to the lower level and burst into the hotel lobby. Even at zero-dark-thirty, there were people in the lobby, checking in, checking out, or simply waiting for someone. They were on the floor now, terrified expressions on their faces, but there was no sign of Coleman or Hodgkins. Damn! Which way?

  A woman screamed again when she saw my gun. “Police!” I yelled as I ran past, half naked with my pistol aimed at the ceiling.

  “He went that way!” one man said, pointing a shaking hand toward the hotel’s front entrance. Plunging through the doors, I entered the broad concourse that led to the Beanstalk terminal.

  The military laser was laying on the floor, next to a wall of ornamental, low-G philodendra. Hodgkins must have tossed it aside, then vanished into one of several passageways, walking to avoid causing panic. Had the two gone to the Beanstalk terminal? The tube-lev to Farside? The collection of shops and restaurants located near the hotel? The tube leading out to the Challenger Carousel?

  I stopped and stood there, panting, as passersby looked at me and my handgun and bare chest with varying degrees of curiosity, indifference, and fear. My leg was throbbing; a patch of my pants leg had melted when Hodgkins had fired the laser, burning the skin.

  Finally, I safed the weapon and tucked it into the waistband of my trousers. They’d gotten away. I picked up the laser rifle by the strap to avoid smearing any prints that might be on it, and limped back to my room.

  Worse was waiting for me when I got there. I walked over to the slashed-open chair to retrieve the monoknife Coleman had left there…and found the knife wa
s gone. I bit off a sharp curse, then gave my whole room a very careful search to make sure one of them wasn’t hiding somewhere, waiting to ambush me with that thing. Either there was a third intruder in this little party, or Coleman and Hodgkins had gone in separate directions in the hallway after leaving my room…and Coleman had snuck back in to retrieve the knife while I was chasing her bodyguard. They might have had a room farther down the hall, or she’d hidden in an airlock or behind the door leading to the emergency stairs.

  Damn it!

  I hobbled over to the desk and picked up the brochures. My PAD, at least, was still there. I touched the replay button.

  “The clones are a threat to all real humans!” I heard Coleman’s voice say. “Bioroids, too! Something has to be done!”

  So I had what amounted to a recorded confession. Humanity Labor’s lawyers would naturally make a stink about the fact that I’d made that recording without the subject’s knowledge and without a warrant and it almost certainly would not be admissible in a court of law…but at least I could use it to convince Dawn that Coleman and Hodgkins were the culprits here, not Eve and Henry.

  I’d wanted the monoknife for Coleman’s prints, to tie her to the murder weapon, and evidently she’d thought of that, coming back to retrieve it while I chased Hodgkins.

  So what now?

  I could wake up Fuchida and get him to check every other room on that hall. The hell with that. Coleman and Hodgkins would be using phony names and IDs, and they might well be gone already.

  I could canvas passenger lists for both the tube-lev to Farside and the Beanstalk. Again, they would have fake names and identification.

  After a moment’s thought, I unfolded my PAD’s screen and began checking security cameras…going to the lobby cams first, then patching into a security camera in the concourse outside the hotel. I pulled up security scans going back just ten minutes.

  I watched Hodgkins run through the High Frontier’s lobby, watched civilians scream and drop to the floor. And I watched me run through a moment later. No sign of Coleman. She must have doubled back the other way, further up the hallway.

  I didn’t see Hodgkins in the concourse, however. The security cam, it turned out, was directly above the ornamental plants, the angle wrong to catch him throwing away the military laser. I saw what might have been him—just from the back—sauntering casually toward the tube-lev terminal.

  I kept watching…kept watching…and then a woman walked through the concourse and through the tube-lev terminal doorway as well…with grip-slippers and a carry-bag, with blond hair down to here. She must have ducked back into another room, donned the wig, grabbed the bag, and followed Hodgkins the moment I’d come back to my room.

  At least now I knew where they were. Farside.

  Once they were at Farside, they could catch a ferry for Heinlein, double back on another tube-train to catch the Beanstalk, or simply find a place to go to ground and hide—inside the Challenger Mines, for example, or in the Farside office complex.

  But there was still time to catch them if I was quick about it.

  I called Guerrero and woke him.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Day 9

  Guerrero wasn’t happy about being awakened in what he called the middle of the night, but he listened as I told him the two perps were tube-leving through the planetoid back to Farside and that we needed yellow jackets to close off their escape routes and pick them up. I passed along the security camera footage of both Hodgkins and Coleman, along with the warning that Coleman was wearing a long, blond wig, but that she might ditch the hairpiece or use some other disguise to throw off the hunt. He assured me that the perps would not get away and he was dispatching teams of yellow jackets at both Nearside and Farside to cut them off.

  I decided not to go back to bed. It was well past five, New Angeles time…and, in any case, my bed was partially sliced in two. Instead, I began catching up on my research.

  First off, there was a long vid monologue from Dr. Jason Cherchi, at the Fra Mauro NAPD station.

  “I looked carefully at your visual scans,” he told me in the saved message, “and then this afternoon I went down and actually examined Eve 5VA3TC in person. In my opinion, the burns on her front torso were inflicted by a taser.”

  He went on at some length to describe what a taser was, though I already knew, of course. It stands, believe it or not, for “Thomas A. Swift’s Electric Rifle,” a reference to a fictional device in a novel written in 1911. Older versions fire a pair of darts attached to wires leading back to the weapon; more modern versions fire a slow, two-pronged bullet with a compact, internal battery. When it strikes human flesh—or bioroid plastic, evidently—it releases a 40,000-volt charge.

  In humans, the charge is incapacitating, causing serious pain and momentary paralysis or spasms. In bioroids, the effect is less predictable, but tends to melt the plastic between and around the round’s penetration point.

  I remembered my conversation with Floyd, about how one way of tampering with a bioroid’s short-term memory would be to zap it with high voltage. If Eve had been in that room when the murderers broke in, they could have used a taser weapon to disable her while they took care of Dow; when she recovered a few moments later, she would have no memory—or only a very scrambled one—of what had happened in the room.

  “I remember…screaming. Screaming…” Eve had told me.

  Yeah, I’ll bet. Dow would have done a lot of screaming when Coleman started taking him apart with the monoknife, at least until his head had finally come off. And the screaming was the only piece of sensory input Eve had retained.

  When the murderers went to clean up, they’d simply plucked the taser round from her lower chest, and assumed the melted spot would be attributed to Dow’s love of sadistic sex with bioroids.

  In fact, the more I thought about it, the more likely it seemed that they’d thought she would remain incapacitated, and be found in the hotel room by the maid later on. It would have played well to the big picture they were trying to construct—that sex-starved Mark Henry had broke in on the couple while they were going at it, been horrified by what Dow was doing to Eve, and cut him up with the laser. The assumption would be that she had malfunctioned from the shock…not the literal shock of the taser, but the emotional shock of Dow’s bloody murder.

  That scenario would have gone a long way to convincing the public that bioroids and clones were emotional, unstable, and capable of irrationally emotional acts, acts that threatened humans.

  Coleman and Hodgkins had been following a two-layered plan. First choice had been to goad Henry into killing Dow with the laser. If Dow was too quick and he wasn’t able to keep the laser focused for long enough to kill the guy, no problem. Dow would have been horribly burned, and be an eyewitness to the attack upon his person by a clone, aided and abetted by a bioroid.

  When Henry didn’t—couldn’t—kill Dow and fled, they fell back on Plan B—disable Eve with a taser, kill Dow using a monoknife to be sure he was dead—decapitation would work—then use the laser to implicate Henry and make the monoknife wounds look like laser burns. There was a risk, that way, of Eve remembering some of what had happened, but her memory would certainly be scrambled enough for those few minutes that it would be tough to make sense of anything she had to say.

  Very, very slick.

  And the only thing supporting that version of what had happened was my conviction that Mark Henry was telling the truth. The melted spot on Eve’s lower chest could be blamed on Dow. The story of “Mr. Green” could be discarded as a clone’s self-serving fiction. In fact, I’d not had any real independent support for the theory until the attack on Henry and me at Fra Mauro…and then the attack on me that morning.

  But as I thought about it, I still didn’t have much in the way of hard evidence. I might have Hodgkins’s fingerprints on the laser rifle, but that tied him to an attempt on my life, not to the Dow murder. I had the recording of both Coleman’s and Hodgkins’s vo
ices, including Coleman admitting—or at least not denying—that they’d killed Dow, but that recording probably wouldn’t be allowed as evidence. I had the bug on my clothing in the closet, but that, I was sure, had been planted by the clone, John Jones, and I hadn’t been able to tie him to the Dow murder yet. For all I knew, Jones was simply a member of SAM, and they were keeping tabs on my investigation…illegal, yes, but not murder-one.

  No, I needed more. Once the yellow jackets captured Coleman and Hodgkins, I might be able to get a confession out of them, especially if I could play them off against one another. Hodgkins, I had the feeling, would be willing to talk about his boss if I promised we’d go easy on him.

  But right now I had zip.

  I did now have the report from the police evidence crew, who’d come up a few days before and gone over Room Twelve at damned near microscopic resolution. It verified what I’d come up with already—the presence of Roger Dow, of a fembot bioroid, and of silube packing gel.

  The problem was that there were also traces of 685 other humans, as identified by traces of DNA—mostly from flakes of skin, dandruff, dried mucus, semen, eyelashes, or hair. The team had done a gamma-emissions scan and recorded over two hundred complete or partial latent fingerprints. There were traces of dozens of meals—baked or pressure-cooked in the High Frontier’s kitchen, or brought in from shops on the concourse. There were also traces of synthetic hair, oil, and artificial skin identifying at least fifteen bioroids, and possibly as many as nineteen.

  And there’d been at least one clone.

  Damn. That room had been as busy as Earth Station Terminus.

  I’d expected as much. Hotel rooms collect the sheddings and effluvia of everyone that goes through them. The cleaning staff—their cast-off biological debris would be in there among the 685 separate human genomes, of course—could do the best job possible with the most powerful cleaning units and robots available, and they still couldn’t hope to get everything.

  Mattresses, especially, collect skin cells and hairs from everyone who uses them, not to mention navel lint, skin mites, sebaceous oil secretions, ear wax, and traces of every other bodily function you can imagine. Self-cleaning mattress surfaces help—so do old-fashioned bed sheets—but the stuff still collects in corners and crevices, on the floor and underneath, and especially inside the microscopic weave of the material.