TekWar

by William Shatner

  “She’ll get it, Rio.” Reaching out, Jake caught him.

  The blonde dealt the plas door a smack with the heel of her hand and it popped open. “Gracias,” she said, smiling over at Rio.

  “De nada.”

  Jake said, “The Cosmos Detective Agency sent—”

  “You’re working for them now?” He started to rise again.

  Jake brought him down with a tug on the sleeve. “They’ve sent some operatives down into Chihuahua.”

  “Not a good location to visit just now.”

  “What happened to them?”

  Rio produced a sad sound in his throat. “Muerto.”

  “All three of them are dead?”

  Rio held up three fingers, nodding. “Sí, it’s very sad.”

  “Who killed them?”

  Rio watched the blonde carry her plate to a table. “You don’t want to know.”

  “I do.”

  “Well, I hear that in two of the deaths it was some important Tek hombres who ordered it. I’ve got no names, so save the next question, Jake.”

  “Who killed the third one?”

  “It was probably Vargas.”

  “Who’s Vargas?”

  Rio answered, “He’s her present lover, and he doesn’t like guys, expecially gringos, trying to get too close to her.”

  “You’re talking about Warbride?”

  Rio made a hush motion with his left hand. “It’s not smart to talk openly about her hereabouts—or even about Rafe Vargas, for that matter.”

  Jake said, “A Professor Kittridge and his daughter disappeared down there. Any idea where they are?”

  “None.” Shaking his head, Rio stood up once more. “But she’d know.”

  “Warbride?”

  After nodding carefully, he started for the door.

  A sooty sea gull coughed once, took three lurching steps along the Boardwalk railing, teetered, fell over. Dingy wings flapping awkwardly, it went plummeting straight down to the rubbish-strewn beach twenty feet below. There was a thunk and a rattling when it hit.

  Gomez said, “I refuse to take that as an omen.” He and Jake were occupying a rusty, green-metal bench about a block away from their upcoming rendezvous spot.

  Jake was scanning the area, eyes narrowed slightly in the hazy midday sunlight. “Everything’s run down quite a bit hereabouts in the past few years.”

  The wide, once bright-yellow boardwalk curved along the Malibu Sector coastline for over a mile. On its right side was the Pacific and on its left stood rows of shops, restaurants and saloons. Everywhere paint was peeling, plas-shingles were popped loose, plastiglass windows and doors were streaked with wind-carried beach dirt. Most of the colored pennants that hung on poles along the walkway railing were faded and tattered.

  “This Boardwalk got to be quite a tekkie hangout two or so years ago.” Gomez checked his watch and then leaned back on the bench. “That led to raids by the GLA cops, our own SCSP, as well as various and sundry anti-Tek agencies. In addition the rival dealers and distributors fought a series of skirmishes—which pitted the Japanese against the Mexicans against the Central Americans against the South Americans against the Africans against the Swiss against the Moonbasers against whoever else was left who was trying to get rich peddling Tek. It was often livelier around here than at a Gomez family reunion.”

  “Things have been getting worse with Tek?”

  Gomez shrugged his left shoulder and grimaced. “In most ways, yes,” he said. “There are more rival dealers hustling the stuff, more entrepreneurs trying to manufacture the chips. Use of Tek is up in GLA. Estimates put it at about eighteen percent of the total pop.”

  “That’s up—what?—about five percent?”

  Gomez nodded, consulting his watch again. “We’ve still got near ten minutes before Dr. Danenberg,” he announced. “I’m not trying to scare you, Jake, but they’ve done a lot more research into the stuff while you were away. Did you already know about the possibility of seizures with tekkies? Been more and more of that showing up of late. They call that effect ‘kindling,’ the formation of a seizure focus. Too frequent use, for some poor bastards anyway, causes them to develop a pretty good imitation of epilepsy. You can get partial complex seizures, which sometimes take the form of flashbacks. Or you might come down with the ‘grand mal’ version. That’s where you shake all over, bite your tongue, lose bladder and bowel control and, if anyone happens to be watching, generally scare the bejabbers out of all and sundry.”

  “No, most of that wasn’t suspected at the time I went up to the Freezer,” said Jake. “You’ve been studying, huh?”

  “It was part of my job as a cop,” reminded Gomez. “And then, too, since one of my best buddies has Tek for a hobby, why, I figured I ought to learn as much about the stuff as I could. That way we’d have something we could talk about on cold wintry evenings in front of the—”

  “I won’t be using Tek again.”

  “Yeah. Seventy-six percent of tekkies promise that at one point or another in their addiction. The percentage that keeps the promise is considerably lower.”

  Jake started along the Boardwalk. “Time for our meeting, isn’t it?”

  Gomez paused to button the jacket of his pale yellow suit and took off after him. “Hey, amigo, I’m not trying to lecture you,” he said, catching up. “But I am concerned.”

  “I know.”

  They walked along in silence for a moment.

  Then, slowing, Gomez said, “That looks like Dr. Danenberg herself up yonder trying to enter the sandwich shop. Who’s that lout blocking her way?”

  “Panhandler.”

  About five hundred yards up ahead the doctor was backing away from a ragged man in an old battle jacket that had BRAZVET written in neon tubing across its back. He was rattling a plascup close to her plump face.

  “I’ll go dissuade the lad.” Gomez started running, dodging the few other strollers on the Boardwalk.

  The blonde doctor had retreated to the seaside of the walkway, halting finally with her back against the railing. She was making a go-away motion at the persistent beggar with her right hand.

  He reached out, grabbing for her.

  She dodged the first lunge, but not the second.

  Gomez was just a few hundred feet away from them when the beggar made contact with Dr. Danenberg.

  There was all at once an enormous whamming explosion. Fire and swirling black smoke blossomed all around the two figures. The concussion of the blast lifted Gomez right off the planking.

  It knocked Jake over, toppling him down hard on his backside.

  As he hit, he saw his partner go cartwheeling through the noonday air. Gomez sailed clean over the rail and went falling toward the beach below.

  “Jesus.” Jake jammed an elbow against the planking, shoved and got himself upright. Stumbling some, he started running for the place where Gomez had gone over.

  10

  JAKE’S FOOT HIT A smear of blackish liquid and he slipped, sliding, nearly falling. He regained his balance, continued running. He noticed there was a scatter of chunks and shards of jagged metal on the walkway, as well as blackened twists of wire and melted scraps of colored plas. But nothing that looked like human remains.

  He reached the place where Gomez had gone over. His partner was lying down below on the gritty beach, in a huddled position with his knees and elbows nearly touching. He’d landed on a clear stretch of sand, near the rusted, gutted remains of an old skycar and the innards of an abandoned sofa.

  Swinging over the railing, Jake climbed down the understructure of the Boardwalk. There was a dead cat, stiff and grinning, at the spot where he landed.

  Two lanky boys of about ten were coming, cautiously, up the beach toward Gomez. Walking close together, both curious and frightened.

  Jake sprinted, skirting the debris on the beach, and got to his partner’s side. He dropped to one knee, touched his fingertips to Gomez’s neck. “Still alive,” he said, relieved.<
br />
  “Some fireworks, amigo,” muttered Gomez, eyelids fluttering.

  “That they were,” agreed Jake. “Just take it easy—there ought to be an ambulance here any minute.”

  Alarm sirens had been hooting up on the Boardwalk for several minutes now. And, far off, the sirens of a medical van could be heard.

  Jake looked up and motioned to the boys, who’d halted about five feet away. “Go on up to the Boardwalk and make sure a medibot gets down here,” he said.

  The two boys didn’t move. Finally the blond one said, “How much?”

  “For what?”

  “To run an errand for you, mister.”

  “A dollar.”

  The dark-haired boy shook his head. “Five bucks or you can forget it.”

  Jake stood up, rapidly, and pointed at them. “Get your ass up there right now and get help. You’ll get your money when you get back here.”

  The dark-haired one seemed on the brink of arguing, but his companion clutched his arm and yanked him into a run. They started scrambling up the Boardwalk supports.

  “I think,” said Gomez in a weak, faraway voice, “maybe my leg ... left one, huh? ... it’s broken.”

  Jake crouched near him. “It could be—legs don’t usually bend this way.”

  “Muy tonto.”

  “Who’s stupid—me or you?”

  “I’m the one ... should’ve suspected that ... bum was a kamikaze.”

  “He was a what?”

  Gomez sighed but didn’t answer.

  Jake leaned closer to his partner. Gomez was still alive, but he’d passed out.

  Two white-enameled medibots came down for him a few minutes later.

  The black plainclothes cop didn’t think much of Jake. “Well, it sure didn’t take you long to start something, Cardigan,” he was saying. “Only your second day off the ice and already you—”

  “C’mon, Captain Hambrick. You know damn well I didn’t have anything to do with what happened.”

  “What I know is that Gomez, who was dumb enough to trust you again, is here in the emergency ward.” The captain was tall and wide and his voice tended to rumble.

  He and Jake were standing in the waiting room of the Emergency Wing of the Pacific Coast Hospital. The green-tinted seethru plastiglass walls looked down on a wide landing/parking area and beyond that a new tract of stilthouses was in the process of being built out over the ocean.

  “What’s important is Gomez right now.” Jake was facing his former Southern California State Police boss. “Our standing here yelling at each other isn’t much going to help him.”

  Outside another skyambulance came chuffing down through the afternoon to the landing area. The rear doors popped open seconds after it touched ground and two medibots eased out carrying a stretcher.

  There was a gaunt young woman, her skin pale and bluish and her eyes staring and deeply underscored with shadows, strapped to the stretcher.

  “Tekkie,” muttered Hambrick, watching them rush her inside the hospital. “Seizure, I’d guess. We can’t blame this one on you, though, since you haven’t been out long enough to get back into Tek dealing.”

  The android doctor Jake had talked to fifteen minutes earlier came back into the waiting room through a white swingdoor. He was believably humanoid, only the AND-MD tag he was required by law to wear on his medjacket gave him away.

  Jake crossed over to him. “Anything new on Gomez?”

  “He’s conscious and our robot brainscanners are going over him, Mr. Cardigan. It looks as though Mr. Gomez isn’t as seriously injured as we initially estimated.”

  “That’s great. Can I see him?”

  “Not just yet, no,” said the android doctor, shaking his handsome head. “We have to run quite a few more tests before we can be absolutely certain about your friend’s condition.”

  “What about the head injuries?”

  “It will probably turn out to be no more than a concussion.” Nodding at Jake and the captain, he went back in to Gomez.

  “So you didn’t succeed,” said Captain Hambrick, “in killing Gomez this time.”

  Walking away from him, Jake sat on the edge of one of the crimson plastiglass visitors’ chairs.

  Hambrick sat, grunting some, in the next chair. “While we’re waiting for more news, I want to talk to you,” he said. “Tell me your version of what happened.”

  “Tell me something first. That panhandler was an android—but how’d they rig him to kill off Dr. Danenberg?”

  “Hell, your Tek-running buddies can explain all that to you. That beggar andy was what they call a kamikaze.”

  Frowning, Jake said, “So that’s what Gomez was trying to tell me—something new to me.”

  “That’s right, you guys don’t get to see the vidnews or read a faxpaper up in the Freezer.”

  “What exactly is the thing?”

  “It’s a very high class andy,” said Hambrick. “We got our first kamikaze killing in GLA just about a year ago. Japan’s where they first turned up. They’re very expensive, but then Tek runners rarely worry about budgets. These damn andies can pass for humans, as can most of the more expensive andies these days. But the kamikazes can also fool just about any security system—even the most sophisticated ones.” He stared out into the afternoon. “Okay, so a kamikaze is instructed to go after a specific target, somebody that one or another of the Tek kingpins wants out of the way. The kamikaze locates his target, quite often in a crowd—which means we’re usually likely to get some fringe deaths along with the main hit. The android, which can be a male or female, will just walk right up to the target. Sometimes it pretends to be an old friend, or maybe a tourist who’s lost or, as today in the Malibu Sector, a bum looking to get a handout. Then the andy touches the victim—could be a handshake, a pat on a back or even an embrace. Soon as that contact is made there’s an explosion. It blows up the victim, the andy and whatever’s in the vicinity. Expensive, but impressive.”

  “Kiss of death,” murmured Jake.

  “Huh?”

  “Reminded me of an old underworld custom I heard about once.”

  “We’ve had twenty-seven kamikaze deaths in GLA so far,” Hambrick told Jake. “Across the whole country the total is around 264. Over in Japan, where they really love the things, there have been 467 kamikaze murders to date.”

  “Okay, I know what it is now,” said Jake. “But why use it on Dr. Danenberg? Far as I know, she hasn’t a damn thing to do with the Tek trade.”

  Leaning, Hambrick tapped Jake’s chest with his forefinger. “Well now, Cardigan, that’s just one of the questions I’m hoping you’ll answer for me. Oh, and that wasn’t actually Dr. Danenberg.”

  “Another android, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah, it was.”

  “That explains why I didn’t see any human remains.”

  “From what we can determine from the descriptions of the passersby who saw the lady before the blowup—the thing was a simulacrum of the Danenberg woman.”

  Jake watched a flock of powergliders drifting far out over the ocean, paralleling the hazy horizon. “Why would she have a sim?”

  “People use them for lots of reasons. Around here celebs use andy replicas of themselves to stand in at public events, to take their place at a potentially dangerous event or even to handle lectures.”

  “But this sounds like Dr. Danenberg was expecting an attempt on her life.”

  “That’s one of the assumptions.”

  “Have you talked to Dr. Danenberg—the real one?”

  “We’ll certainly do that, soon as we find the lady. She’s not at SoCal Tech, not at home and not at several other obvious locations. We’re looking for her.”

  “So what really happened at the Boardwalk was that Gomez risked his life trying to keep one gadget from destroying another gadget.”

  “That’s about it,” agreed the captain. “Why were you and Gomez meeting with her?”

  “You’re going to have to ask the Cosm
os Agency about that.”

  The captain grabbed Jake’s arm. “I’m asking you.”

  Jake took Hambrick’s hand from off his sleeve and stood. “I don’t work for you anymore.”

  “Just keep this in mind. As far as I’m concerned you still ought to be on ice,” said Captain Hambrick, rising. “You give me too much crap, Cardigan, and I’ll do everything I can to see you get sent back to the Freezer.”

  “I’d figured that out before you even told me.”

  “I also think you ought to forget about working for Cosmos. You’d be better off trying to find a nice quiet security guard job someplace.”

  Jake gave him a bleak grin. “This morning maybe I’d have considered quitting. Not now, though—now I’m going to find out who sent that kamikaze.”

  “That noble bullshit doesn’t impress me,” said Hambrick. “You’ve always been a cold, calculating son of a bitch—that’s why they all called you the Android. Listen, if Gomez was lying in there dead now, you really wouldn’t give a damn. So don’t pretend—”

  “You bastard!” Jake’s fist went back and he started to throw a punch. But then he stopped. Shaking his head, he dropped his hands to his sides and stepped back. “No, nope. I’m not going to let you goad me into hitting you, Captain. You’re not going to get me back up to the Freezer that easy.”

  Hambrick laughed without opening his mouth. Giving Jake a disdainful look, he turned and walked away.

  Jake stood watching him until Hambrick was outside. He worked hard to get his anger under control. That took several minutes.

  11

  THE BEAUTIFUL SILVER-SKINNED and platinum-haired receptionist said, “I’m not an android.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.” Jake was sitting in a licorice-colored plastiglass chair in the Tower II reception room of the Cosmos Detective Agency Building.

  “What I’m getting at is, I’m a human being,” she added, tapping a finger against her silvery cheek. “I’ve been going through some what you might call changes in my life lately and I decided to experiment with my basic look.”

  “It’s striking.”