Android: Free Fall

by William H. Keith

  To Brea, who took me into the future.

  © 2011 by Fantasy Flight Publishing, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Ebook edition published in 2011.

  Cover illustration by Remko Troost.

  This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN: 978-1-61661-252-8

  Android, Free Fall, all associated characters, character names, and distinctive likenesses thereof, Fantasy Flight Games, and the FFG logo are trademarks owned by Fantasy Flight Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

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  Chapter One

  Day 1

  I knew where I’d find the damned gilún even before I pinged his vid. His secretary popped up on my PAD with Flint’s lopsided grin and said, “Hey, Fish. I’m out of service right now. But you can leave a message…if you want.”

  I didn’t bother. Like I said, I knew where the idiot was going to be.

  A thin, warm drizzle was falling through air so humid I felt like I was drowning. I put my vid away and looked around. Buildings towered like canyon walls on all sides, some alive with animated graphics fifty meters high, most of them lit with neon and holo-ads. It was well past midnight, but even in daytime the sun rarely made it to the streets this deep in the city. Down here, the illumination came from the pulsing LED light displays and animated projections no matter what time it was.

  And it was noisy. Wall-to-wall people in a bustling, cacophonous mass babbled away in Spanish, Spanglish, English, Chinese, Arabic, Russian, Japanese, and a hundred other languages and dialects. Most of the street front displays were accompanied by their own entrainment frequencies, a throbbing, pounding thunder of noise that you felt more than heard, overlaid by soundtracks promising everything from new bodies to condo-habs on the Moon. I dialed up my filters and slogged ahead, tuning most of the racket out. I wasn’t here for the shopping.

  The city of New Angeles is big, almost sixty thousand square kilometers tucked in between the coast and the Andes, from the Guayaquil District to Esmeraldas, and following the Guayllabamba Valley east through the Andes del Oeste to the international border at Quito. They say over a billion people live here, and I don’t doubt it. It’s big, it’s sprawling, it’s noisy, it’s crooked as a politician’s view of life, and, unfortunately, it’s home. Someday I’ll retire and ride the Beanstalk one last time up to Heinlein.

  Someday can’t come soon enough.

  A police drone hovered above the street on whining tilt-jets, but the jostling crowds around me ignored it. Tommy Liu’s Diner was a hole-in-the-wall just ahead, a seedy little sitsleazy not far from Levy U., tucked in between a bioelectronics resale mart and Happy Trick’s Recreational Emporium.

  I felt the entrance try to deduct a quarter from my balance as I stepped through the heavy door into drugged smoke and darkness, but my credaccount blocked it. This visit wasn’t exactly line-of-duty, but it wasn’t a social call either. The door-sec bouncer was an Adonis G-mod named Fred, a guy who looked like he bench-pressed airbuses for fun. He was slouched in his armored booth, hunched over the backscatter screen. His eyes widened a bit when he saw the hand cannon hidden under my jacket, but then he saw the holo number projected by my badge and the ping-back from my electronic ID and waved me through the next set of doors with an indifferent sneer.

  This joint is so cheap the servers are real humans, and there are cubes in the back where they’ll serve you other things than crappy sandwiches or hard liquor if your balance can swing it. Nothing wrong with the place, mind you. It’s popular with the noir set. You know the look—kids, mostly, shocking their parents by wearing the fashions of a couple of centuries ago. There were lots of shabby trench coats and old-fashioned fringe skirts in the joint. I even saw a couple of ties.

  At least the hostess was a bioroid, one of the older Giselle models, I thought, judging from the top-heavy carriage and the blank expression.

  “Hello there…Rick,” she said, putting all the sultry come-hitherness into my name her cyberware could manage as she plucked it from my e-ID. “What’s your pleasure toni—”

  She stopped in mid-sentence, frozen for an uncomfortable moment. Then a new voice, a man’s voice, came from those synthetically wet lips. “Captain Harrison,” the voice said. “Welcome to Tommy’s. Is there a problem?”

  “No problem, Tommy,” I replied easily, glancing past her shoulder into the crowd beyond. “Just looking for someone.”

  “Help yourself. But if things get rough, take it outside, will ya? That last little misunderstanding cost me a bundle.”

  In twelve years on the Force, I’d never actually met Tommy. Hell, he didn’t even live in New Angeles. His real name was Sydney Rodriguez and his address was in the Vegas Tower, up on the thousandth-and-something floor somewhere. He worked for a franchise run by Shanghaicorp, which meant he was up to here with the tri-mafs, but that wasn’t my concern.

  I slipped past the bioroid, who’d frozen into immobility when Tommy stepped in. She seemed to relax a moment later, shrugging back into character, as it were, but she ignored me, focusing her gynoid interest on a rumpled-looking noir set streetbanger who’d walked in behind me.

  Tapping in Flint’s number, I used my PAD to pull up a locator. The arrow flashed and pointed that way, giving a distance of fifteen point one meters. Picking my way down three steps into the greasy near-darkness, I followed the pointer.

  Tommy had a full house this evening. Music throbbed from ceiling and floors—BluDeth, I thought it was, though I wasn’t much for classics. You need enhancements to even hear some of that stuff, much less sort it out from raw noise.

  I found Flint alone at a table, a half-empty bottle of Moonwalker and a dirty glass in front of him. The guy looked a bit noir himself, with that antique trench coat of his. He didn’t even look up as I walked up behind him. “Evening, Fish,” he said. The words were slurred a bit, and I could tell I’d probably already lost him. Poor bastard.

  “It’s morning,” I told him. “Mind if I join you?”

  A shrug was as much of an answer as I was going to get. I took a seat as a blond waitress wearing green-glowing stilettos and a matching garterpouch that didn’t cover a damn thing came to see what I was drinking.

  “Ginger ale,” I told her. “With lime.”

  An animated tattoo set off fireworks across her chest, but her bored expression somewhat ruined the effect. She gave me a sour “so what are you doing here?” look, shrugged, which did delightful things to her upper charms, and said, “You’re the boss.”

  As she sashayed off, I reached out and snapped my fingers in front of Flint’s nose, pulling his alchie-fuzzed attention away from the waitress’s highly mobile glutes and back to my face.

  “We have a job for you, Raymond. Hey! Are you in there?”

  “Nobody home, Fish,” he replied, and he took a deep chug from his glass, draining it. “Get y’self another…another…wossname.” He was having trouble focusing.

  “Don’t call me that,” I said.

  “Call you what?”

  “‘Fish.’”

  He smirked as he poured himself another glass, fi
lling it almost to the rim. “You’re the NAPD’s gallant Captain of Detectives, right? That’s COD. Cod’s a fish, y’know? Cold-water fish. Swims with the pack. Or it did, back before the oceans died…”

  “Yeah, but you yahoos don’t usually call me that to my face. What happened to ‘Captain Harrison’?”

  “Dunno. Ain’t seen him…ain’t seen him since the War…”

  This wasn’t going to get us anywhere.

  “So what’s the problem, Ray? The memories again?” I’d seen Flint like this before, way too many times, and I was getting damned sick of it.

  “Ain’t got no memories,” he said, taking another drink. “Not now. Tha’s why I’m here, right? An’ not…an’ not chasing goddamned slimeball perps through rathole sewers on the stinkin’ ass-side of this goddamned frag-hole of a mega…a megapo…city…”

  Raymond Flint was a burnout. There were enough of them around; ex-soldiers, former Marines, one-time Striker pilots who wondered why they were alive when the others weren’t. And then there was the matter of the girl…some old playmate who’d distracted him long enough to get a buddy killed.

  I knew because I’d been on Mars with him. I’d known him during the War—been in the same Striker unit, the 308th. We’d chewed a lot of the same ocher sand, and five years later we’d both ended up in the NAPD. We’d been tight. He’d helped me pull my life together after Nina ditched me.

  Yeah, sure, Flint had been through hell, but, damn it, who hadn’t? He needed to square himself away and focus on the now, stop reliving the nightmare, stop picking at the scab.

  “You know, Ray,” I told him with measured words, “if you crawl back inside that fragging bottle, we’re washed. I swear, I’ll scratch you from the roster. I can’t use a detective who can’t see past his next drink.”

  “Yes, mother,” he replied, and took another swallow.

  “I mean it. You’re one of the best detectives on my P.I. list. But you’re fragging useless to the Force like this.”

  “An’ what do I care about the Force?” He turned his head and looked at me through bleary eyes. “Hell, what’s the Force to you?”

  He had me there. For years, now, I’d been planning on quitting the NAPD and setting up on my own—the Harrison Private Detection Agency. Had a nice ring to it, y’know? New Angeles law says that a P.I. has to have had police experience to buy his license, and I’d had twelve years on the NAPD so far, but I was sick to death of the damned politics.

  The hell with retirement. I was ready to set up on my own.

  But then I would look at a freelance loser like Raymond Flint, and I would start thinking that maybe having the job security of the Force wasn’t such a bad thing after all.

  “The Force,” I told him, “is a steady credaccount deposit ticket. And every once in a while, it’s a way to feel like you’re good for something, that you make a difference. You feel some self-respect and maybe a bit of dignity. More than you’re gonna find inside that bottle, anyway.”

  “Blaine tell you that?”

  Frag. Louis Blaine was one of the Department’s wunderkind, a top-notch Force detective…but he was right there in the tri-maf’s hip pocket and everyone knew it—the best cop money could buy. Self-respect and dignity. Right…

  “We’re not talking about him,” I said. “We’re talking about you…and whether or not I’m going to have to pull your license.”

  “You can’t. P.I.’s aren’t licensed by the Force. Y’need…you’d need a court order. And show cause.”

  Even drunk the guy was pretty sharp. I’d thought maybe I could rattle him.

  “So? If I don’t send any more cases your way, what are you gonna do? Skip traces and deadbeat dads?”

  The waitress returned with my drink. I waved my hand over the reader clipped to her wrist, then popped her a fifty percent tip in scrip. She looked a little less bored after that, and gave me a salacious wink as she made the folding stuff vanish into her pouch. “Thanks, Slick,” she said. She showed me the tip of her tongue and the fireworks on her chest got a bit more exuberant. “Anything else I can do for you?”

  “Don’t have time tonight to find out right now, honey.” I turned back to Flint as she left. “I’m serious, Ray. This is it. I won’t cover for you anymore, and I won’t send you any more cases, not if you let me down again.”

  It looked like whatever brain cells he still had alive behind those haunted eyes were choosing up sides. “A new case, huh?” He wiped his mouth with the back of a hand. “So…whatcha got, anyway?”

  “Some corp ristie or other got himself fried,” I said with a shrug. “Mining laser, sounds like. Helluva mess, and the Feds are going to be interested. I need someone on the crime scene. Someone I can trust.”

  “Yeah? Where’s the scene?”

  I hesitated. This was where I could lose him, I knew.

  But I wasn’t going to lie. “New Frontier Hotel. Challenger Planetoid.”

  He blinked. The warring brain cells had at it for a few more seconds, and then one side charged the barricades, planted the flag, and declared victory. “On top of the fraggin’ Beanstalk? No, Fish. Uh-uh.”

  “Ray—”

  “Get yourself another private dick.” When I started to protest he held up a hand. “I mean it. I ‘prish…I ‘ppreciate all the stuff you’ve done for me, Rick. I do. But…but you know what that damned place…does to me. Every fraggin’ time.”

  “If that’s the way you want it, Ray.” I waited, but he didn’t reply. I drained my own glass, slammed it on the table, then stood. “Look at you. The hotshot Striker pilot. Suicide by whiskey. I have no patience with burnouts who hide from life in a bottle, Ray. I’m tellin’ you, this is it.”

  “Yah. Nice knowin’ ya, Fish.”

  There wasn’t a damned thing I could do for him.

  “You’re an alcoholic, Flint,” I told him. “You need help.”

  “Alcoholic…workaholic…what’s the difference?”

  That made me mad. I clenched my fist and, so help me, I was that close to putting the poor, sick bastard down, putting him down hard. For an angry moment, I was looking into Nina’s eyes again as she called me an addict and a workaholic and told me to get out of her life. But he just sat there, staring straight ahead with both hands locked around the glass.

  I don’t kick puppies, small kids, or burned-out drunks. I like to think I have some self-control left. And maybe just a tattered shred or two of self-respect.

  So I made myself relax my fists, made myself turn and walk away. Flint was bent over on the table, now, his head in his arms, and in the dim, blue light scattering through the joint, it looked like his shoulders were shaking.

  Screw him. I wasn’t his mother. Mother was not in my job description. I shook my head and left, the door trying again to deduct a quarter as I passed the house bouncer.

  Outside, the police drone was still there. It rotated, one of its eyes extending as it gave me a closer look. I tipped it a casual, one-fingered salute and it lost interest, drifting away over the crowd. The drizzle had turned to a steady, steaming rain, acid enough to melt the garbage in the street. I let my smartslick unfold to cover my head, back, and shoulders, and splashed back to my car.

  A ragged pack of streetbangers squabbled and scrabbled over something in an alley. A couple of noiries who looked like they’d just stepped out of an old-fashioned black-and-white flatfilm haggled with a street vender. Other venders competed with one another with shouted promises. From somewhere overhead, a voice big enough to be the Voice of God summoned the faithful: “Opportunity! A chance for a new start! A new life! The Martian Colony! Opportunity! A chance…”

  Zero-three-fragging-hundred; didn’t this damned city ever sleep?

  So Ray Flint was out. Who was I going to send now?

  The Department has two kinds of detectives on tap—the badges and the P.I.’s. Badges are cops, police detectives on the Force roster, but every now and then we’ll bring in a private eye. The Commissioner l
iked Flint, said he gave us “an outside view.” I was going to have to tell her that our outside view had turned into a close-up of the gutter.

  Who else was there on tap? As Captain of Detectives, I had the roster memorized. Floyd and Nisei were both up in Heinlein working a case. Blaine and Chu were on the Moon, too, chasing down megacorp scandals and threats of miners’ strikes, and I wondered again what idiot had decided the Quito Accord was a good idea. Gomez…sick leave. Beckman…unavailable, tracking down a bounty in the Eastside Tenements. Donovan…testifying in court, probably for the rest of the week. Byron…Imahara…Hyneman…all of them, badges and P.I.’s both, assigned to other cases or vanished off the radar.

  Well, I told myself, you wanted to get out from behind your desk…

  A quartet of bangers was working over my Wuhan cruiser when I got there, but they scattered at my approach, vanishing into the faceless crowd. Their spray paint wouldn’t stick to the mirror-black finish, of course; it was already washing off in the steady rain. The scratches and shiv-gouges would melt out when I put some current through the body, though I was tempted to leave them. They gave the car a homey, lived-in look that made it just a bit less conspicuous, at least in this part of town.

  My thumbprint opened the gull-wing door and powered up the engine. I brought up the holoconsole and switched on the takeoff alert, flashing strobes, and warning chirp, and unfolded the tilt-jets. If the crowd was concerned about my jet wash, they didn’t show it, so I gunned the throttle and drifted skyward on a shrill whine.

  “You are entering flight-control restricted airspace,” the Wuhan’s sexy voice told me. Well, duh. I was in the middle of New Angeles. It was all FCRA, even for hoppers and backpack fliers. “Please state your destination and relinquish manual control.”

  “Back to the barn,” I told it. And I leaned back in the seat to catch some shut-eye.

  “Engaging City Flight Control,” the Wuhan said in honey tones. “Destination New Angeles Police Department, Rooftop Garage.”