“I don’t understand, señor,” Captain Alvarado said, “how you could have been pursuing these people when all of you were inside the same beanpod?”
I nudged Coleman. “What deck were you on?”
“One,” she sneered.
“You see?” Alvarado said with an expressive Latino shrug. “She was following you down.”
“Not when we started out.”
“I am most sorry, señor.” He looked genuinely miserable. His command and his rank in the Ecuadorian Navy were on the line, however. A diplomatic crisis could destroy both in short order. “But…I’m afraid that we need to refer this matter to the diplomats.”
Which meant delays and appeals and, quite likely, freedom for these two.
Slowly, I holstered my pistol. “Well…if that’s the way you want to play it,” I said.
“You see?” Coleman said, laughing at me. “You’ve got nothing!”
Reaching out, I scooped her bodily up off the deck.
She screamed, and pounded at my head and shoulders. “What are you doing! ¡Malparido! ¡Hijo de puta! Let me go!”
“Mike?” I said. “Get the other one. Bring him along.”
“No! No!” Hodgkins said, throwing up his hands. “I’ll come with you!”
I strode across the deck with the furious, squirming, and kicking Coleman over my shoulder. My leg was hurting a lot now, but I used the pain to fuel my anger, my sense of purpose, and my determination to see this through. I reached the beanpod lying on the deck near the ship’s bow, its once-bronze surface now charred and streaked with black. Three neat, square holes a meter on each side showed in the burned surface, one for each of the three decks. I reached the opening into Deck One and unceremoniously shoved her inside.
She squealed again, then hit somewhere inside with a thump. Hodgkins followed her inside a moment later, urged on by Big Mike Morales.
I turned, hands on my hips, blocking the opening. “Captain Alvarado…I’m certain you haven’t tried to claim this pod as salvage, since there were people on-board when you recovered it. So I am now declaring that this beanpod is, as a distressed New Angeles spacecraft, technically still American property and, therefore, American soil. I would like you to witness for me that these two American citizens are, in fact, on American soil and, as such, are subject to my jurisdiction.”
A slow smile spread across Alvarado’s face. “I don’t think,” he said, “I could possibly argue with you there.”
“Gracias.”
I suppose Alvarado could have argued the fact of the beanpod being a spacecraft when it had no engines to call its own…but all he was looking for was a reasonable and face-saving way to get out of the way of a potential diplomatic clash between the U.S. and Ecuador. I stood outside the pod, gun in hand, as the Calicuchima made her way northwest across the lake toward the port of San Rafael. After a lengthy radio exchange with the tilt-jet overhead, the Calicuchima came to a halt while cables were lowered from the aircraft and fastened on to grapple-holds in the pod’s sides.
Mike, Steve, Federico, and I all clambered through the opening and into the pod. We strapped our prisoners in—awkwardly, since the seats were on their sides, now.
Lily climbed on-board with us.
“Where do you think you’re going?” I asked her.
“With you, of course. I don’t think you realize what a big deal this is. I’m the only representative of the news media for a hundred kilometers, and I’m following this story through to the end!”
As Alvarado had said, I couldn’t possibly argue. A PAD call to the tilt-jet above us, and we were hoisted smoothly clear of the Calicuchima’s forward deck.
Thirty minutes later, we crossed the border into New Angeles.
“Damn you, Harrison!” Coleman growled. “You know we’re still going to walk! You don’t have proof of anything. It’s just your word against ours! And Humanity Labor has the best lawyers in New Angeles!”
“Maybe,” I told her. “But I think you’re missing the point.”
“What’s that?”
“Vaughn tried to kill both of you. Whoever put that bomb on the pod was doing so at his orders…and it was meant to silence the two of you. But you managed to get away—which means your boss is going to keep after you. He definitely can’t afford to let you live now.”
Her eyes got very wide at that.
“I suggest that you tell us everything you know…about Vaughn, about Martín, everything.” I switched on my PAD. “And you can start by giving me the names of everyone connected with this…”
We touched down at the NAPD’s private airstrip an hour later, lowered gently from the sky.
And Coleman, Hodgkins, and Cavallo were all still singing loud and long.
An hour later I was in the Commissioner’s office.
“Nice job, Harrison,” she said. Dawn didn’t pass out compliments lightly, so the frank statement was the equivalent, for her, of a medal and an awards banquet.
“Thanks.”
She offered me a cup of coffee and I accepted.
“Of course, our chances of getting Martín are just about zero,” she added.
“Huh? Why?”
“Use your head. All we have is the word of Coleman and Hodgkins that he was running the deal. There’s no proof. He’ll disappear, his lawyers will fight a rearguard action, and eventually the case will be dropped for lack of evidence.”
“Frag. What about Vaughn?”
She shook her head. “No physical proof linking him to the crime. Same thing.”
“Come on, Commissioner!” I was on my feet. “What the hell was I out there for, then?”
“You got the triggerman, Harrison. And the triggerwoman. And your timing couldn’t have been better. Do you realize that you stopped what could have been a very nasty series of riots?”
“I figured Vaughn’s press conference was going to blame androids for Dow’s murder,” I said. “That could have sparked something.”
“Indeed it would have. Something widespread and very, very bad. Vaughn would have delivered his little speech, and then he had Dow’s wife there with him to ask why we weren’t doing anything about the murder. He even had ringers planted in the audience to make sure the right questions were asked, the right shouts of indignation, the right level of agitation. We think he had people throughout the city waiting to start leading mobs out hunting for clones. Bioroids, too, probably. It would have been bad.”
“So what happened?”
She grinned. “You happened. Haven’t you seen the newsrags yet?”
“I’ve been…busy.”
She touched a key on her virtual keyboard, and turned in her chair. The wall behind her came on, filled with…my face.
It was footage from Lily’s monocam, showing me hunched over the PAD on the beanpod, my hands moving back and forth through the holographic controls as I maneuvered the tug in for the rendezvous. Earth, blue and magnificent, drifted across a wall display in the background.
“…no way to tell whether we’re going to get out of this or not,” Lily’s voice was saying, “but Captain Harrison is doing everything he can to bring us down safely. I can’t interrupt him now, obviously, but he must be bringing to bear every gram of experience, training, and skill gained by his years as a fighter pilot during the War to see us safely down to Earth…”
“You can’t believe everything you see on the news,” I said.
“No. But Lockwell uplinked her story live to Midway, and it went out over all three NBN channels and a dozen newsrag issues with maybe a five-minute delay for editing. Several hundred million people were watching you in New Angeles alone. When you lost signal coming through re-entry, the whole damned city held its breath. That hour became high drama for half the city. When Vaughn realized what was happening, he cancelled the news conference and disappeared.”
“You tried to pick him up?”
“Of course. He’s gone. Probably Shanghai, where he has business interests…and th
ere are no extradition treaties.”
“The rich generally find a way to get out when the getting’s good.”
“True. And you’re going to have to watch your step. You’ve made some powerful enemies today.”
I shrugged. That went with the territory.
“You’ll probably get a medal.”
Another shrug. “Whatever. The important thing is that we have Coleman, Hodgkins, and Cavallo. I’d suggest some extra security for those three.”
“Already taken care of. Assuming they do live long enough to come to trial, they’ll be going away for a long time.”
“You have enough evidence to make the charges stick?”
She chuckled. “Oh, yeah. Let’s see…while you were playing Striker pilot this afternoon, we finally got a team up to Challenger. They just called down a few minutes ago. They picked up DNA traces of Cavallo, Hodgkins, and Coleman in the clean-sweep scan of the hotel room. You were right. All three were in there. We’ve found their DNA in Room Sixteen, as well. We’ve also positively IDed Cavallo as the man with the suitcase in the hotel lobby.”
“Good.”
“We’ve found the suitcase in Cavallo’s room at the High Frontier. Two hotel towels inside—soaked with Dow’s blood…and DNA for all three. Plus the cuffs that Dow used on the bioroid, a flogger, and some other S&M stuff they cleaned up to make it look…more normal. But, you know? We probably won’t even have to bring any of that in as evidence. Oh, we will, of course, to make a tight, complete case…but it won’t be necessary.”
“Why not?”
“Thanks to you and Flint, we have a surprise witness.”
“Who is that?”
She grinned again, and typed another entry into her computer. The wall display shifted to show Raymond Flint’s grinning face.
“Hey, Commissioner,” the recorded message said. “Flint, up in Heinlein. Listen…I had a hunch and got into an electronic powwow with Dr. Cherchi and some of the double-domes over at Haas-Bioroid. It turns out that bioroid memory isn’t quite the same as human memory. Stands to reason, I suppose. Bioroid memory is stored on silicon. We’re still not sure how human beings do it.
“Anyway, they’ve been working on Eve, on the part of her digital memory that was blanked, and managed to find this.”
Flint’s face vanished…and was replaced by the face of Roger Dow at very close quarters. The face was huge and glowering, peering at us out of the wall with some dark and twisted inner fury.
It took me a moment to realize that I was looking at Dow through Eve 5VA3TC’s eyes—that she was flat on her back, with him lying on top of her.
“You ugly little pile of spare parts!” he spat. “You synthetic piece of crap. You…”
A door announcer chimed.
“Who the hell is that?”
“Room service,” a voice answered over the intercom. I recognized Coleman’s voice. A voiceprint analysis would clinch it for the court.
“I didn’t order room service!”
“This is very special room service, compliments of Mr. Fuchida—”
“Move, you,” Dow growled, and the camera view tumbled as he pushed Eve out of the bed.
“Open!” Eve’s voice said.
Eve was starting to get up as Coleman entered the room. “Thea!” Dow said from the tangled bed. “What the hell are—”
“Sorry, Roger. New business agenda.”
Cavallo was right behind Coleman, already raising the taser pistol to aim at Eve. He fired—and Eve’s vision blanked out in a burst of white static.
But the image cleared for a moment as she fell—still partially obscured by white noise but the picture was steady enough—to show Hodgkins coming through the door behind Cavallo with the mining laser.
Dow was still in bed, holding himself up with one arm against a wall as Coleman brought up the monoknife. “I see you found yourself a new girlfriend,” she sneered, and her arm slashed down, viciously, repeatedly, and without mercy…
The screams went on and on as the vid faded once more into white static.
Dawn switched it off.
“Not often you can actually get a murder on vid this way.”
“Eve let them in.”
“She’d been ordered to, and she was just following her programming. According to Flint, they’ve recovered the complete list of operating commands.”
“How the hell did they reprogram her? At Eliza’s Toybox?”
“Nothing so complicated. We think they used the hotel’s wireless network to access her surface programming—that’s software that can be accessed by the clients using her for…shall we say…particular needs?”
“You mean if the client wants his sexbot to talk a certain way, or call him names or something.”
“Exactly. Turns out you can download a list of simple commands from the Eliza’s Toybox site on the Net. Anyone with any real programming skill at all could use that to slip in something extra…like a virus that has Eve order the door to open when she hears a particular voice.”
I nodded. “I was thinking something like that when I was at the Toybox, actually. They could have used a wireless remote to infect her. Maybe when she walked past them in the hotel lobby. Or even from the hall outside Dow’s room.”
“That’s what we think.”
“I wouldn’t like to see her disassembled because of that,” I said. “Like you say, she was just following programming.”
“It won’t come to that. There’s no proof that she was in on the conspiracy at all. She went where she was told, and did what she’d been told to do. Like any good bioroid. Haas-Bioroid will be going to bat for her if need be…but I don’t anticipate any charges there.”
“Mark Henry?”
“Same thing. They’re bringing both of them down now. They’ll be here sometime tomorrow for a thorough round of questioning, but I imagine we’ll release them soon. Oh…by the way. Henry has positively identified a photo of Hodgkins as ‘Mr. Green.’ Flint showed it to him in Heinlein.”
“So Vargas’s murder was incidental. They were just getting Dow’s bodyguard out of the way.”
“Exactly. The bio-work-up on Eve turned up negative for any of Vargas’s DNA. Vargas was sent away so Dow could play with her. We think Hodgkins put him out of the airlock, though it’s possible they had some other toughs on their payroll. We’re checking that. His arm was broken because of the osteoporosis, not because he was thrown out by a bioroid. Hodgkins was ex-military and had respirocytes, so he could have breathed vacuum for long enough to toss Vargas outside. Besides, Vargas had been at the Challenger complex for five years. Hodgkins was fresh up from Earth. Hodgkins could have twisted Vargas up like a pretzel. I’m wondering if Vargas was assigned to Dow deliberately, for just that reason.” She sat back in her chair, hands flat on her desk. “In any case, it looks to me like this one is just about wrapped up and in the bag.”
“But there must be something we can do about Vaughn and Martín! We can’t just drop it!”
“We can, Harrison. And we will. It’s over…”
She looked angry…and just a little bit afraid.
Epilogue
Much later, I walked the streets of New Angeles.
Crowds of people jostled and pushed along Market Street as shopkeepers and pushcart venders shouted and hawked and wheedled in a dozen languages. Neon signs and building-sized holographs shifted in the murky air overhead. The sun had set, bringing darkness…but the darkness could never take hold of the New Angeles streets, not really.
A billion people crowded together, noisy, angry, scared, hopeful, lust-driven, happy, depressed, lonely, lost, found, giving up, catching hold, dying, living…
I like it in Heinlein. I like it on the Beanstalk. But groundside New Angeles always feels like home when I return.
Not that I like it, mind you. I hate the city.
I hate the politics, the deals, and the corruption. I hated that Vaughn and Martín were going to walk on this one.
&
nbsp; This one. They would be back, eventually.
And I’d still be here, waiting.
I was wondering about one thing…something Federico Cavallo had said up there in the beanpod as we fell from the sky.
“Vaughn and someone on the Humanity Labor board were gonna get cabinet posts once the Feds took over the Beanstalk. And all of us stood to make a lot when that deal goes through…”
People will do terrible things for money and power. Cliché, but true.
I remembered Dawn telling me that the Feds were waiting in the wings, waiting to step in if the Mayor declared a state of emergency and seize the Beanstalk.
The Beanstalk meant trillions of dollars for whoever controlled it, for whoever controlled the flow of helium-3 down from Heinlein.
Riots in the city…martial law…and the Feds step in to save a priceless and irreplaceable resource—the Beanstalk.
And different people, different corporations, different power groups would be there to take the profits. With Vaughn as Secretary of Commerce, handing out choice plums to his cronies…
Yeah…what are a few bloody riots in the streets when you stand to gain control of that much raw wealth and power?
Was our own government, ultimately, behind the conspiracy?
Maybe. No wonder Commissioner Dawn had looked afraid.
Or maybe Cavallo had just been shooting off his mouth, trying to ingratiate himself. It happened. Lying sleazeballs happened more often than did massive conspiracies.
Who do you believe?
Some conspiracies are just too big to touch…too big to believe…
There was one thing I knew, though…Lily had told me she’d be waiting for me in the foyer of the Bradbury Towers, where I had my apartment up on the ninety-fifth floor.
Android: Free Fall Page 30
